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DAILY · THREE CLUES

Which country is this?

HOW IT WORKS ◢

  1. You start with one clue and four countries to choose between.
  2. Every wrong guess costs you a life and buys you the next clue.
  3. The clues get more specific: where it is and how many live there, how big it is and which side they drive on, then what its capital starts with.
  4. Three guesses. Get it and the streak grows; miss it and the streak resets.
  5. Either way you get the whole factsheet at the end, and a link to the full page.

WHY THE CLUES READ LIKE THAT ◢

Every clue is built out of the country’s own numbers - continent, population, area, driving side, calling code, time zone, and the first letter and length of its capital. That is deliberate rather than lazy. The interesting write-ups on the 197 countries in the rotation are no use as clues, because they name the place: they mention the country, the language, the currency and the people, and any one of those ends the game on the first line. So the write-ups are the prize instead, and you get the whole card once the round is over - right or wrong.

THE LONG ANSWER ◢

193, if you want one number, because that is the membership of the United Nations. It is up from the 51 states that founded the UN in 1945, and it is the only figure backed by an actual list of members who joined on dated occasions.

Every other count is higher, and most of them are defensible. The organisations that have to identify countries for practical reasons, so that post arrives and phones connect and passports scan, have all quietly declined to say what a country is.

Key Takeaways

  • The United Nations has 193 Member States, grown from 51 in 1945.
  • ISO 3166, the standard behind .fr and .au, codes "countries, dependencies, and other areas of particular geopolitical interest", and takes the names themselves from the UN rather than deciding them.
  • The ITU's list of international dialling codes is headed "Country, Geographical area or Global service", says its contents imply no opinion on the legal status of anywhere, and footnotes Kosovo's entry to say so again.
  • The UN's own statisticians say that sorting countries into regions is "for statistical convenience" and implies nothing about political affiliation.

How many countries are there in the world?

193 by UN membership, and more by every other measure, because membership of the UN is a decision states make and not a description of the world.

The United Nations puts the number plainly: "Currently made up of 193 Member States, the UN and its work are guided by the purposes and principles contained in its founding Charter." The same page notes the growth from 51 original members in 1945.

That is a defensible answer to give in a general-knowledge quiz. It is not a definition of a country, and the UN does not offer one. Membership follows recognition and admission, both of which are political acts, so the list records what states have agreed to rather than what geography contains.

Two more entities sit just outside it. The UN lists the Holy See and the State of Palestine as non-member observer states, the latter granted that status by General Assembly resolution A/RES/67/19 on 29 November 2012. Add those two and you get the 195 you will also see quoted.

Why do the counts of countries disagree?

Because the other registers are built for jobs that need more entries than 193, and you have almost certainly been quoted one of them.

Take ISO 3166, the standard behind every two-letter country code you have ever typed. Its scope is broader than "country" by design. Part 1 covers "countries, dependencies, and other areas of particular geopolitical interest", because a postal service needs a code for Greenland whether or not Greenland is a state.

ISO is also careful about where the names come from. The standard "does not define the names of countries", it says. That information comes from United Nations sources, specifically the Terminology Bulletin Country Names and the codes maintained by the UN Statistics Division.

The standard even has a formal way of retiring a country. Part 3 covers non-current names deleted since ISO 3166 was first published in 1974, which is where Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia now live. There is a reserved range as well, for users who need a code for something the standard does not list.

So the honest shape of the answer is: 193 states, plus a longer tail of dependencies and territories that any working system has to name anyway.

How long a tail? ISO does not say. Its page on the standard publishes no headline total at all, and points you instead at the Online Browsing Platform, where "the information is always up to date". That is a reasonable position for a register that expects to change, and it is quietly the best answer to the original question: the body most people would ask for a count declines to print one.

The pattern repeats across every register that has to name countries for a living. Each keeps a list. Each says, in writing, that the list is not a ruling.

Register What it covers What it explicitly declines to do
UN membership 193 Member States Define a country. Membership follows admission, which is a political act
ISO 3166 Countries, dependencies and other areas of particular geopolitical interest Define country names, which it takes from United Nations sources
ITU E.164 "Country, Geographical area or Global service" Express any opinion on the legal status of any country or area
UN M49 Statistical regions, sub-regions and intermediary regions Imply any political or other affiliation from the grouping

What actually identifies a country?

Three codes and a phone number. You have used all four without noticing.

ISO 3166 gives every entry three codes, and each one exists for a different reason.

Code What it is Why it exists
alpha-2 Two letters, such as FR or AU ISO recommends it as the general-purpose code. It is what internet country domains are built from
alpha-3 Three letters ISO designed it for a better visual association between the code and the country name
numeric-3 Three digits Useful when you need to avoid Latin script altogether

Those codes are why postal containers, machine-readable passports and international bank transfers can identify a place without anyone agreeing on a language. They are on the country factsheets too, because they are the least ambiguous thing you can print about a place.

They are also why the internet is divided the way it is. As ISO puts it, "Internet domain name systems use the codes to define top-level domain names such as '.fr' for France, '.au' for Australia."

The fourth identifier is the dialling code, and it works differently enough to be worth its own section.

Why do dialling codes tell you where countries are?

Because they were handed out by world zone, so the first digit is a rough map.

The ITU publishes its list of assigned country codes (PDF) as an annex to its Operational Bulletin, amended issue by issue. The counts below are from the consolidated list published on 15 December 2016. Read it in numerical order and the geography mostly falls out of it.

The 2s are mostly Africa: Egypt 20, South Africa 27, South Sudan 211, Morocco 212, Algeria 213.

The 3s and 4s are Europe. That block runs from Greece at 30 to Liechtenstein at 423, 48 assigned codes in all, and the only two I would call geographically arguable are Cyprus and Armenia. Zone 7 is the narrowest of the lot. Two entries hold the whole of it, Russia and Kazakhstan, while the other post-Soviet states sit in the 3s and the 9s.

The zones are administrative rather than geographic, though, and the tail of the African block gives the game away. The last three codes in it are 297 Aruba, 298 the Faroe Islands and 299 Greenland, none of which is anywhere near Africa. They are there because the numbering plan follows administrative ties, not latitude.

The famous case is +1. It is not the United States' code. On that 2016 list, twenty-five separate entries share it, including Canada, Puerto Rico, Guam, Jamaica, Bermuda, the Bahamas and a long list of Caribbean territories, because they belong to one shared numbering plan rather than to one country.

The ITU is as careful as ISO about what it is not saying. Its list is headed "Country, Geographical area or Global service", and the note at the front states that "the designations employed and the presentation of material in this List do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the ITU concerning the legal status of any country or geographical area, or of its authorities."

It goes further where it has to. Kosovo holds code 383, printed with an asterisk and a footnote reading: "This designation is without prejudice to positions on status, and is in line with UNSCR 1244 and the ICJ Opinion on the Kosovo declaration of independence." A telephone numbering table, hedging on statehood. If you want codes that were built to hide a message rather than to name a place, that is a different craft entirely.

Who decides which continent countries belong to?

Nobody with the authority to settle it, and the body most often blamed for it says so in writing.

The UN Statistics Division maintains M49, the standard country and area codes for statistical use, which is where a great many dataset continent groupings ultimately come from. It divides the world into regions, then into sub-regions and intermediary regions chosen, in its own words, to get "greater homogeneity in sizes of population, demographic circumstances and accuracy of demographic statistics".

Note what that criterion is not. It is not geology, culture, history or politics. It is statistical tidiness, and the UN is explicit about the consequence: "The assignment of countries or areas to specific groupings is for statistical convenience and does not imply any assumption regarding political or other affiliation of countries or territories by the United Nations."

Which is why arguments about whether a country is European or Asian, or which continent an island belongs to, never resolve. There is no register that settles them, only registers that are careful to say they are not trying to.

Which facts about a country are the stable ones?

The administered ones. Somebody has to sign something before they change.

Population and area are measurements. They are estimates between censuses, they get revised, and two sources will disagree about the same country in the same year. They are the facts most likely to be out of date wherever you read them.

Which side of the road a country drives on is not like that. Nor is the name of its capital, nor the code the ITU assigned it, nor its two letters in ISO 3166. Each of those had to be legislated, gazetted or entered in a register, and each leaves a dated record when it moves. A country that changes which side it drives on does it on an announced day. A country that gets a dialling code gets it in a numbered issue of the ITU's bulletin.

Continent sits awkwardly in between, and now you know why: it is a convention chosen for statistical tidiness by people who said in writing that they were not ruling on anything.

The other thing worth carrying away is to be suspicious of any list. A set of "all the countries" is a set of choices about dependencies, territories and disputed status, and whoever compiled it made those choices whether or not they said so.

Fancy identifying a country by looking at it instead? Flag Daily puts up one national flag a day and gives you three guesses, and the rest of the daily games are there once you have done it.

Frequently asked questions

Are there 193, 195 or 197 countries?

All three are in circulation, and only the first is a count of members. The United Nations has 193 Member States. 195 is those plus the two non-member observer states the UN lists, the Holy See and the State of Palestine. 197 has no register behind it at all. It is 195 plus two partially recognised states, usually Taiwan and Kosovo, and no body publishes it. Higher figures come from registers such as ISO 3166. Its scope covers "countries, dependencies, and other areas of particular geopolitical interest", not states alone.

What is ISO 3166 and who maintains it?

It is the international standard that assigns each country and territory a two-letter code, a three-letter code and a three-digit numeric code, maintained by the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency. It was first published in 1974 and deliberately does not decide country names, which are taken from United Nations sources. It also reserves ranges for anything it does not list: the letters AA, QM to QZ, XA to XZ and ZZ, and the numbers 900 to 999, are set aside for users to assign privately, with no ISO procedure behind them and no guarantee two systems will use them the same way.

Why do the United States and Canada share the same phone code?

Because +1 is a numbering plan rather than a country code. The ITU's consolidated list of 15 December 2016 shows twenty-five separate entries sharing it, among them Canada, the United States, Puerto Rico, Guam, Jamaica, Bermuda, the Bahamas and much of the Caribbean. Elsewhere the codes were allocated by world zone, so African countries sit in the 2s, European ones in the 3s and 4s, and Kazakhstan shares 7 with the Russian Federation. The zones follow administrative ties rather than geography, which is why Greenland and the Faroe Islands sit at the end of the African block.

Which continent is a country in, officially?

There is no official answer. Most datasets use the UN Statistics Division's M49 groupings, which the UN says are drawn to obtain "greater homogeneity in sizes of population, demographic circumstances and accuracy of demographic statistics" and are "for statistical convenience", implying nothing about political affiliation. Different bodies group the same countries differently, and none of them is overruling the others.

What happens to a country's code when the country stops existing?

It gets retired rather than reused. ISO 3166 has a whole part for it: Part 3 records codes for names deleted from the standard since 1974, such as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, and does so with four-letter codes whose construction depends on why the name was removed. That way a code sitting in a decades-old database still resolves to what it meant when it was written, instead of quietly pointing at whoever inherited the two letters.

Sources