How many countries are there?
It depends on who you ask. The United Nations has 193 member states, and two more, the Vatican City and Palestine, sit in as observers, so the figure most often quoted is 195. A few places, such as Taiwan and Kosovo, run their own affairs and are recognised by some countries but not others. The newest widely recognised country is South Sudan, which became independent in 2011.
The smallest is the Vatican City, the home of the Pope, inside the city of Rome in ITALY; at under half a square kilometre, it is smaller than many city parks. The largest is Russia, which spans eleven time zones and is bigger than the whole of Pluto's surface. CHINA and Russia share the record for bordering the most neighbours, fourteen each.
Borders that do odd things
Some countries are surrounded entirely by others. Only two, Liechtenstein in Europe and Uzbekistan in Central Asia, are doubly landlocked: every neighbour they have is landlocked too, so reaching the sea means crossing at least two borders. CHILE, by contrast, is a thin ribbon down the western edge of South America, over 4,000 kilometres long and on average less than 200 kilometres wide.
Surprisingly, the country with the most time zones is FRANCE. Counting its overseas territories, scattered from the Caribbean to the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, it covers twelve, more than Russia or the United States. CANADA has the longest coastline in the world, much of it wrapped round thousands of Arctic islands.
Small places with big records
San Marino, a tiny country perched on a mountain inside Italy, claims to be the oldest republic in the world, founded, according to tradition, by a stonemason called Marinus in the year 301. Monaco, on the French Riviera, is the most crowded, with nearly forty thousand people squeezed into about two square kilometres. The Pacific island of Nauru has no official capital city at all.
Some countries measure success in unusual ways. The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan decided in the 1970s to aim for Gross National Happiness rather than simply wealth, and it surveys its people to see how they are doing. ICELAND has no army of its own. Our world leaders page covers some of the people who have run the biggest ones.
Names with stories
Many country names describe a place or a people. ARGENTINA comes from the Latin word for silver, after the silver the first Spanish explorers hoped to find there. ICELAND was said, in an old saga, to have been named by a disappointed Viking who saw a fjord full of drift ice; oddly, Iceland is mostly green in summer, and Greenland mostly ice. The name of JAPAN in Japanese, Nihon, means origin of the sun, and it is sometimes called the land of the rising sun. Our flags page covers the designs that go with the names.
Some countries have changed their names recently. TURKEY asked the United Nations to use Türkiye in 2022, and Swaziland became Eswatini in 2018. The grid also holds BRAZIL, EGYPT, INDIA, MEXICO, SPAIN, GERMANY, KENYA, NORWAY, GREECE, SWEDEN, PERU, NIGERIA, THAILAND, POLAND and VIETNAM, from every continent.