Meanings
- colloquialhumorouscartographyThe location at zero degrees latitude and zero degrees longitude (0°N 0°E).
Yup, that's why it's 'steer in that direction' .. maybe towards Null Island? :)
2011 May 17, Sam Vekemans <acrosscanadatrails@gmail.com>, “Re: Alternate wiki to document tags”, in OSM fork mailing list, via Google Groups, archived from the original on 09 Feb 20262 more examples
About seven years ago, Mr. [Nathaniel Vaughn] Kelso, who had heard the phrase used by other cartographers, encoded Null Island as the default destination for mistakes into a widely used public-domain digital-mapping data set called Natural Earth, which has been downloaded several million times.
2016 July 14, Robert Lee Hotz, “If You Get Directions Wrong, You'll Be Banished to Null Island”, in Wall Street Journal, via Proquest, →ISSN, page A1All GPS coordinates were transformed using a Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area projection, centered at the Null Island (0ºN, 0ºE), and all positions were then interpolated at 30 min intervals, to facilitate the calculation of distances travelled.
2024 November 29, Edna Correia, José Pedro Granadeiro, Ngoné Diop, Francisco Wambar, Alfonso Hernandez‑Rios, Teresa Catry, “High variability in the migratory behaviour of a tropical seabird”, in Marine Biology, volume 171, number 11, Springer, →DOI, →ISSN, page 212
Cite this entry
Null Island. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Null%20Island
“Null Island.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Null%20Island. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “Null Island,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Null%20Island.
Source: Null Island on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.