tooth. 1. (in most vertebrates) one of the hard bodies or processes usu. attached in a row to each jaw, serving for the prehension and mastication of food, as weapons of attack or defense, etc., and in mammals typically composed chiefly of dentin surrounding a sensitive pulp and covered on the crown with enamel.
In a second, larger sense, East Indies refers to the Malay Archipelago (including the Philippines), which now is more commonly called insular (or archipelagic) Southeast Asia. Finally, in its broadest context, the term East Indies encompasses the foregoing plus all of mainland Southeast Asia and India.
On the southeast of Asia are the Malay Peninsula (the limit of mainland Asia) and Indonesia (Isles of India, the former East Indies), a vast nation among thousands of islands on the Sunda Shelf, large and small, inhabited and uninhabited.