Melanesia is a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean, northeast of Australia. School maps usually name Fiji, Vanuatu, and the Solomon Islands; the group is larger than that tidy list, and Papua New Guinea is the big land at the western end. People say Melanesia for the place, and also for the peoples and languages there. It is a geography word more than a chatting word, but you will see it in news and travel writing. A French explorer made the name from Greek words for dark and island, grouping islands whose people often have darker skin. That is a nineteenth-century European way of cutting up the Pacific, alongside Polynesia and Micronesia. The name is still used, but some people now handle it carefully, because it was built from how people looked.

美拉尼西亞