Aran Islands

1 5.3

A group of three small islands off Ireland's coast known for old stone monuments and traditional Irish culture

proper noun

: Islas Aran

I've just thrown down the anchor of my tall sailing ship near Inishmaan, part of the Aran Islands off the west coast.

Examples

There's a fellow lives on lnishmore - it's one of the Aran Islands - called O'Hara.

The Matchmaker (1997)
At any rate, she'd come along this morning, and she had said the Aran Islands were sunny.

Fiction book (2002)
Tomorrow we're taking a ferry to Inis Mor, one of the Aran Islands.

Fiction book (2002)
Tomorrow we're taking a ferry to Inis Mor, one of the Aran Islands.
She'd grown up on the Aran Islands, so the rough sea didn't bother her.

Surface Forms

Aran Islands main

Morphology

Aran + island

The phrase is compositionally built from a proper name + the noun 'islands', so a learner who knows 'island' and recognizes 'Aran' as a name can correctly infer it refers to islands called Aran. While the learner would not derive the detailed location or cultural information from the constituents, the basic referential meaning ('a group of islands named Aran') is directly predictable and cross-linguistically common.

Etymology

Aran Islands may come from the old Irish word Árainn, meaning 'ridge'. The islands look like a long, low ridge from the sea, so the name stuck for this small group of islands known for their ancient sites.