West Indies

The West Indies are an island subregion of the Americas, surrounded by the North Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, which comprises 13 independent island countries and 18 dependencies in three archipelagos: the Greater Antilles, the Lesser Antilles, and the Lucayan Archipelago.

The subregion includes all the islands in the Antilles, in addition to The Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands, which are in the North Atlantic Ocean. The term is often interchangeable with "Caribbean", although the latter may also include coastal regions of Central and South American mainland nations, including Mexico, Belize, Honduras, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, French Guiana, Guyana, and Suriname, as well as the Atlantic island nation of Bermuda, all of which are culturally related but geographically distinct from the three main island groups.

The English term Indie is derived from the Classical Latin India, a reference to the territories in South Asia adjacent and east to the Indus River. India itself is borrowed from Ancient Greek India (Ἰνδία) 'India', which is derived from Indos (Ἰνδός) 'Indus River', itself borrowed from Old Persian Hindush (an eastern province of the Achaemenid Empire), whose cognate is Sanskrit Sindhu, which means 'river', specifically the Indus River and its well-settled southern basin. The ancient Greeks referred to the Indians as Indoi (Ἰνδοί), lit. 'people of the Indus'.

In 1492, Christopher Columbus and his Spanish fleet left Spain seeking a western sea passage to the Eastern world, hoping to profit from the lucrative spice trade emanating from Hindustan, Indochina, and Insulindia, the regions currently found within the Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia, which were first simply referred to by Spanish and Portuguese explorers as the Indias (Indies).

Thinking he had landed on the easternmost part of the Indies in the Eastern world when he came upon the New World, specifically in Champa in what is now southern Vietnam (see Dragon's Tail (peninsula) § Age of Discovery), Columbus used the term Indias to refer to the Americas, calling its native people Indios (Indians). To avoid confusion between the known Indies of the Eastern Hemisphere and the newly discovered Indies of the Western Hemisphere, the Spanish named the territories in the East Indias Orientales (East Indies) and the territories in the West Indias Occidentales (West Indies). Originally, the term West Indies applied to all of the Americas.

The Indies from both regions were further distinguished depending on the European world power to which they belong. In the East Indies, there were the Spanish East Indies and the Dutch East Indies. In the West Indies, the Spanish West Indies, the Dutch West Indies, the French West Indies, the British West Indies, and the Danish West Indies.

The term was used to name the Spanish Council of the Indies, the British East India Company, the Dutch East India and West India companies, the French East India Company, and the Danish East India Company.

Many cultures were indigenous to these islands, with evidence dating some of them back to the mid-6th millennium BCE.