ISLE

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

IPA (US):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does isle mean? 

• ISLE (noun)
  The noun ISLE has 1 sense:

1. a small island

  Familiarity information: ISLE used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• ISLE (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A small island

Classified under:

Nouns denoting natural objects (not man-made)

Synonyms:

isle; islet

Instance hypernyms:

island (a land mass (smaller than a continent) that is surrounded by water)

Instance hyponyms:

Perejil (a small uninhabited Mediterranean islet claimed by both Morocco and Spain)

Isle of Wight; Wight (an isle and county of southern England in the English Channel)

Derivation:

islet (a small island)

 Context examples 

I walked about the isle like a restless spectre, separated from all it loved and miserable in the separation.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

The isle was uninhabited; my shipmates I had left behind, and nothing lived in front of me but dumb brutes and fowls.

(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

Then, too, she loved nature, and with generous imagination he changed the scene of their reading—sometimes they read in closed-in valleys with precipitous walls, or in high mountain meadows, and, again, down by the gray sand-dunes with a wreath of billows at their feet, or afar on some volcanic tropic isle where waterfalls descended and became mist, reaching the sea in vapor veils that swayed and shivered to every vagrant wisp of wind.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of the solitary rocks and promontories by them only inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape—Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, with the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space,—that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above heights, surround the pole, and concentre the multiplied rigours of extreme cold.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

He besought me, therefore, to leave my solitary isle and to meet him at Perth, that we might proceed southwards together.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

At last—I think it was on the third night—the doctor and I were strolling on the shoulder of the hill where it overlooks the lowlands of the isle, when, from out the thick darkness below, the wind brought us a noise between shrieking and singing.

(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

Sometimes the isle was thick with savages, with whom we fought, sometimes full of dangerous animals that hunted us, but in all my fancies nothing occurred to me so strange and tragic as our actual adventures.

(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

Our eyes lifted over the rosebeds and the hot lawn and the weedy refuse of the dog days along shore. Slowly the white wings of the boat moved against the blue cool limit of the sky. Ahead lay the scalloped ocean and the abounding blessed isles.

(The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald)