How Many Island Nations Have You Been To? Three Rules, Three Totals

Ask ten people who have been to Japan, Ireland and Australia how many island nations they have visited, and you will get three different answers. Some will say three. Some will say two, because Australia is a continent. A few will say one, because Ireland shares its island with the United Kingdom and they are not sure that counts either.

None of them are wrong. They are using different rules, and the rule is the part nobody writes down. This piece sets out the three questions that decide the number, shows where the common lists disagree, and explains exactly which rule MapMyWorld uses — including the two places where our own list makes a choice you might not.

Why the number is less obvious than it sounds

"Island nation" sounds like a geography fact. It is actually three separate judgements stacked on top of each other:

1. What counts as a nation? UN members only, or also places like Taiwan that govern themselves without broad recognition?
2. What counts as an island? Where does an island stop and a continent start?
3. Does the country have to own the whole island? Or is holding part of one enough?

Change the answer to any one of these and the total moves. That is the same problem we ran into when counting continents — seven, six or five depending on which school you learned in — and the fix is the same: pick a rule, write it next to your number, and stop re-arguing it at every dinner. If you have not read it, how many continents have you been to walks through that version of the argument.

Question 1: which nations are on the list at all

The most widely cited reference is Wikipedia's list of island countries. It includes 50 entries in total: 46 UN member states, two states in free association with New Zealand (the Cook Islands and Niue), and two states with limited recognition that control territory entirely on islands (Northern Cyprus and Taiwan).

So before you have made any geographic judgement at all, your ceiling is either 46 or 50, depending on whether you count sovereignty the UN's way.

This matters most for Taiwan. It is an island, and it runs itself. If you have been, most people would say you have been to an island nation. Whether your record agrees depends entirely on whose list it follows.

The Cook Islands and Niue are harder cases. They are self-governing, but they sit in free association with New Zealand, and many country lists — including ours — do not carry them as separate countries at all. If your reference list has no row for them, a visit cannot count towards anything, however clearly it was an island.

Question 2: is Australia an island?

This is the argument that never ends, and it has a clean answer only if you accept a definition.

Geographers generally separate islands from continents by geology rather than size: a continent is the main landmass of a tectonic plate, and an island is land surrounded by water that is distinct from a continent. By that rule Australia is a continent, and Greenland — which is smaller — is the largest island in the world.

Wikipedia's list follows that logic and leaves Australia out, noting it is "considered a continental country". It adds that Australia was historically called an island country because it has no land borders.

Plenty of people still count it. It is surrounded by sea, you can only arrive by boat or plane, and nobody drives there from anywhere. If your instinct is "I crossed water to get there and there is no land border, so it counts", you are using a perfectly reasonable rule. It is just a different rule from the reference list.

Question 3: do you need the whole island?

Seven UN island countries share their island with at least one neighbour:

• Haiti and the Dominican Republic split Hispaniola.
• Ireland and the United Kingdom share the island of Ireland, with Northern Ireland part of the UK.
• Timor-Leste holds the eastern half of Timor; Indonesia has the west.
• Papua New Guinea holds the eastern half of New Guinea; Indonesia has the west.
• Brunei sits on the north-west coast of Borneo, the world's third-largest island. Indonesia holds about 73% of Borneo and Malaysia about 26%, leaving Brunei a small slice.
• Cyprus shares its island with Northern Cyprus, which only Turkey recognises.
• Indonesia itself appears on all three of the shared islands above.

The standard list counts every one of these as island countries anyway. The test it uses is whether the country lies wholly on islands, not whether it owns every island it sits on. That is why Malaysia is not on the list: half of it is on the Asian mainland, even though the other half is on Borneo.

This produces a genuinely odd edge case. Stand in Kota Kinabalu, in Malaysian Borneo, and you are on the same island as Brunei — but you have not visited an island nation. Cross the border into Brunei, further down the same coast, and you have. The rock under your feet has not changed. The country has.

Three rules, three totals

Put those three questions together and you get three defensible counting rules. Here is how they score the same person — someone who has been to Japan, Ireland, Australia, Taiwan and Iceland:

Rule	What it counts	Japan	Ireland	Australia	Taiwan	Iceland	Total
Strict reference list (UN members, no continents)	46 UN island states	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes	3
Broad reference list	All 50 including Taiwan, Cook Islands, Niue, Northern Cyprus	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	4
"No land border" rule	Any self-governing country with no land border	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	4

Notice that two rules both produce 4, from different countries. Ireland drops out of the third rule because it has a land border with Northern Ireland. That is exactly why the total alone is not enough to write down. "4 island nations" means nothing unless the rule travels with it.

Which rule MapMyWorld uses

Our Island Hopper achievement unlocks at 5 island nations, and it counts from a fixed list of 47 country codes defined in the app. We would rather tell you what is on that list than let you guess.

It is the 46 UN island states from the strict reference list, plus Australia. Nothing else.

That produces three differences from the reference list worth knowing about:

• Australia counts. We include it because it has no land border and plenty of people count it as an island. If you follow the geologists, subtract one from whatever the achievement says.
• Taiwan does not count. Taiwan is in our country reference — you can mark it as visited and it colours on your map — but it is not on the island list. If you use the broad reference list, add one.
• Greenland does not count. It is the largest island in the world and it has its own row in our country list, but it is an autonomous territory of Denmark rather than a sovereign island state, so it sits outside the island list.

Everything else — Hispaniola, Timor, New Guinea, Borneo, Ireland, Cyprus — follows the reference list: the country counts even though it shares its island.

The count comes from the countries you have marked as visited or lived. A country with any other status does not count. And because countries are unlimited on every plan, including Free, the achievement is reachable without paying for anything.

How to settle your own number

If you want a total you can defend, do this once and keep the result:

1. Pick your rule. Strict list, broad list, or no-land-border. If you have no strong view, use the strict list — it is the one other people are most likely to be using when they compare numbers.
2. Write the rule next to the number. "4 (strict list)" is a fact. "4" is an opening for an argument.
3. List the edge cases you have actually hit. Most people have only one or two — usually Australia, Taiwan or the island of Ireland. Note which way you ruled on each and why.
4. Make your country record the source. Mark each country as visited in one place, then derive the island count from it. A separate list of islands drifts out of sync the first time you add a trip and forget to update it.

The last step is the one that keeps the number honest in five years' time. Island counts are a derived figure: they depend on which countries you have been to plus a rule. Store the countries, store the rule, and the count takes care of itself. The same logic applies to anything you count from your country list — continents, capitals, hemispheres. We wrote up the country-level version of this in what counts as visiting a country, and the capital-city version, where Bolivia and a handful of others make it awkward, in countries with two capitals.

The honest limits of the achievement

A few things the Island Hopper badge does not do, so you are not surprised:

• It does not let you change the rule. The 47-country list is fixed. You cannot switch to the strict or broad reference list inside the app, so if your rule differs, the badge and your own number may disagree by one or two.
• It counts countries, not islands. Ten Greek islands in one summer count as zero island nations, because Greece is not an island country. Five Philippine islands count as one.
• It says nothing about where you actually were. Two nights in Kuching, Malaysian Borneo, does not count, and a two-hour transit in Singapore's airport does, provided you have marked Singapore as visited. The achievement follows your country record, not a map of your footsteps. Whether a transit should count as visiting is your call; your country record is where you make it.

None of these are bugs. They are the choices every island list makes, written down rather than left for you to reverse-engineer.

The short version

There are 46 UN island countries by the most common reference, 50 if you include Taiwan, the Cook Islands, Niue and Northern Cyprus, and a different number again if you count Australia or drop the countries that share an island. MapMyWorld counts 47: the 46, plus Australia. Pick the rule you believe, write it next to your number, and let your country record do the arithmetic.