Greater

The Greater Antilles are one of the island groups in the Caribbean Sea. Comprising the islands of Cuba, the Cayman Islands, Hispaniola (containing the Dominican Republic and Haiti), Puerto Rico, and Jamaica, the Greater Antilles constitute over 94% of the land mass of the entire West Indies, as well as over 90% of its population. The other island group in the archipelago is the Lesser Antilles, a chain of islands to the east (running north-south and encompassing the eastern edge of the Caribbean Sea where it meets the Atlantic Ocean) and south (running east-west off the northern coast of South America). The word Antilles originated in the period before the European conquest of the New World – Europeans used the term Antilia as one of the mysterious lands featured on medieval charts, sometimes as an archipelago, sometimes as continuous land of greater or lesser extent, its location fluctuating in mid-ocean between the Canary Islands and Eurasia.