mainland

plural mainlands

1. The continent; the principal land, as distinguished from islands or a peninsula.

   You may have not realised when I was using the term mainland Europe, I was excluding the British Isles.

   2005, comment (not durably archived)

   2 more examples

   […]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.

   1719 May 6 (Gregorian calendar), [Daniel Defoe], The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, […], London: […] W[illiam] Taylor […], →OCLC

   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.

   2019 January 29, Melvin Konner, “A Bold New Theory Proposes That Humans Tamed Themselves”, in The Atlantic, →ISSN, archived from the original on 09 Jul 2019

2. The principal island of a group.
3. Northern IrelandGreat Britain.

   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.

   2024 February 10, Emma DeSouza, “The most effective cure for Northern Irish unionism? Attitudes in England”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

4. New ZealandSouth Island.

1. The largest island in the Orkney Islands council area, to the north of Scotland.
2. The largest island in the Shetland Islands council area, to the north of both Orkney and Scotland.
3. historicalA historical region of British Columbia, British North America, British Empire.