mainland
/ˈmeɪnlənd/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.95 in modern English
11
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
name
The largest island in the Orkney Islands council area, to the north of Scotland.
name
The largest island in the Shetland Islands council area, to the north of both Orkney and Scotland.
name
A historical region of British Columbia, British North America, British Empire.
Example Sentences
- "[…]I got to the mainland, where, to my great comfort, I clambered up the cliffs of the shore and sat me down upon the grass, free from danger and quite out of the reach of the water."
- "You may have not realised when I was using the term mainland Europe, I was excluding the British Isles."
- "Other examples of nonhuman self-domestication in the wild exist—for instance, the Zanzibar red colobus monkey diverged from the mainland African red colobus in similar ways during its island isolation—but bonobos are the closest and most relevant to us."
- "All of the people I interviewed were from Protestant backgrounds, with proud British traditions. Yet when they set foot on the mainland, they were met at times with jeering, derision and othering from the very people with whom they were raised to believe they had the most in common."
Etymology
From Middle English mayne londe; equivalent to main + land. Compare Scots mayn-land, magan-land, madin-land (“mainland”), Faroese meginland (“mainland”), Icelandic meginland (“mainland”).
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈmeɪnlənd/
- British English: /ˈmeɪnlænd/