Largest Islands in the World

The 15 biggest islands ranked by total land area in km². Greenland is by far the largest island on Earth at over 2 million km², though Australia is often classified as a continent rather than an island.

Data

#	Island	Location	Area (km²)	Area (mi²)
1	Greenland	North Atlantic / Arctic	2,130,800	822,700
2	New Guinea	Pacific Ocean	785,753	303,381
3	Borneo	Southeast Asia	748,168	288,869
4	Madagascar	Indian Ocean	587,041	226,658
5	Baffin Island	Canada	507,451	195,928
6	Sumatra	Southeast Asia	443,066	171,069
7	Honshu	Japan	227,960	88,017
8	Victoria Island	Canada	217,291	83,897
9	Great Britain	UK	209,331	80,823
10	Ellesmere Island	Canada	196,236	75,767
11	Sulawesi	Indonesia	174,600	67,413
12	South Island	New Zealand	150,437	58,084
13	Java	Indonesia	138,794	53,589
14	North Island	New Zealand	113,729	43,911
15	Luzon	Philippines	109,965	42,458

Source: Wikipedia — List of islands by area. Australia excluded as it is classified as a continental landmass.

Note: What You Should Know About the World's Largest Islands

Big islands are fascinating — they double as entire countries, host millions of people, and some are nearly too big to think of as "islands" at all. Here's a friendly crash course on the world's largest islands and the strange rules that decide what actually counts as one.

What counts as an island?

Simply put, an island is any landmass that is completely surrounded by water.
But there's one important catch: to be an island (and not a continent), a landmass has to be smaller than a continent. Size is what separates the two.
By that rule, Greenland is the world's largest island, at over 2 million km².
Australia is even bigger than Greenland, but geographers treat it as a continent, not an island — which is exactly why it doesn't appear on this chart.
So the crown of "largest island" goes to Greenland for the simple reason that Australia is in a different category entirely.

Top islands by area

Greenland — 2,130,800 km² — the undisputed champion, sitting mostly within the Arctic Circle and owned by Denmark.
New Guinea — 785,753 km² — the second largest island, split between the country of Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.
Borneo — 748,168 km² — the only island in the world shared by three sovereign countries.
Madagascar — 587,041 km² — a favorite of biologists because of its unique wildlife found nowhere else on Earth.
Baffin Island — 507,451 km² — part of Canada, and largely ice-covered and rugged.
Sumatra — 443,066 km² — one of the largest islands in Indonesia and rich in volcanic terrain and rainforest.

Islands that are countries

Madagascar is a fully independent country that occupies its own single island — no shared land borders, just ocean all around.
Great Britain isn't a country by itself, but it holds three of them: England, Scotland, and Wales (together forming the UK with Northern Ireland).
Iceland, Cuba, Jamaica, and Sri Lanka are more examples of entire countries living on one big island.
Indonesia isn't on one island — it's the world's largest island country in a different sense, spread across thousands of islands.

Fun facts

Borneo is shared by Malaysia, Indonesia, and the tiny nation of Brunei — the only island on Earth with three countries on it.
Most of Greenland is buried under an ice sheet, yet it's home to a small population mostly hugging the coastline.
Even though Sumatra is huge, Java — one of the smaller big islands here — packs in far more people, since Indonesia's capital has long been there.
Honshu is the largest and most populated of Japan's islands, holding most of the country's big cities.
Because the top spot depends on how you define a continent, the "largest island" title always comes with that little Australia asterisk.
Most of these giants are found near the equator or in cold northern regions — geography really decides who gets the biggest landmasses.