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COUNTRYRUSH BLOG,

The largest countries in the world by area

Big countries sound easy: Russia, Canada, and then it gets thin. But the exact order and the real numbers turn out to be tricky, and sources still disagree about third place.

Russia plays in its own league

At 17,098,246 square kilometres, Russia is almost twice the size of Canada in second place. It stretches across eleven time zones. When the day starts in the west, it is already evening in the east. No other state comes close to that span.

The ranking, with real figures

Total area, meaning land plus inland water:

  • Russia 17,098,246 km²
  • Canada 9,984,670 km²
  • China 9,596,960 km²
  • United States 9,525,067 km²
  • Brazil 8,510,346 km²
  • Australia 7,741,220 km²
  • India 3,287,263 km²
  • Argentina 2,780,400 km²
  • Kazakhstan 2,724,910 km²
  • Algeria 2,381,741 km²

The Democratic Republic of the Congo follows closely at 2,344,858 km². It misses the top ten by less than 37,000 km², roughly the area of Switzerland.

Third place is a question of definition, not geography

Some atlases put China third, others the United States. Both are right. They simply count different things.

Counting land plus inland water, China leads with 9,596,960 km² against 9,525,067 km² for the United States. The split is what makes it interesting: China has 9,326,410 km² of land and 270,550 km² of inland water, the United States 9,147,593 km² of land and 377,424 km² of inland water. The US has clearly less land and clearly more water, above all the Great Lakes.

Add coastal and territorial waters, as the CIA World Factbook does for the United States, and the figure rises to 9,833,517 km², which moves it into third. The same arithmetic is not applied to China. The swap does not happen because a country grows. It happens because the yardstick moves.

In practice: if you want to memorise third and fourth place, know that both answers are defensible. If you want to argue about them, bring the source.

Three countries that are more than merely big

Canada is not only the second largest country, it also has the longest coastline in the world, thanks to the tens of thousands of islands in its Arctic archipelago, whose shores all count.

Kazakhstan is by far the largest landlocked country on Earth at 2,724,910 km², larger than Western Europe. Almost nobody can draw its outline.

Algeria is the largest country in Africa, but only since 2011. Until South Sudan became independent, Sudan within its old borders was bigger. A country can take the top spot without gaining a single square metre.

Area is not population, and not familiarity

Canada is the second largest country on Earth and has fewer inhabitants than several mid-sized European states, because its far north is barely habitable. Australia is an entire continent and thinly populated. India ranks only seventh by area and is among the most populous countries in the world.

That mismatch is what makes the list dangerous in a quiz. The brain sorts countries by familiarity, not by square kilometres. Argentina feels smaller than it is, Kazakhstan much smaller, Algeria more so. Meanwhile almost everyone overestimates Germany, France or Japan.

What actually helps in a quiz

You rarely recognise the giants by name. You recognise them by silhouette: Brazil's bulging shape, Australia standing alone, the wide arc of Russia, India's triangle. Learn the outlines of the ten largest countries and you have covered roughly half the land surface of the planet, which turns out to be a surprising share of all questions.

The other half of the work is the inconspicuous giants: Kazakhstan, Algeria, Argentina, the DR Congo. They rarely come up in daily life, which is exactly why they top the error list in every round.

CountryRush trains that reflex: see the outline, place the country, secure the flag. The Daily Trip mixes large and small countries every day, so you do not only hit the obvious giants. If outlines are your weak spot, read recognizing country outlines, and for the other end of the scale there is the smallest countries in the world.

Greenland would rank twelfth, but it does not count

Greenland measures 2,166,086 square kilometres. That would place it between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Saudi Arabia, twelfth in the world. It appears in no ranking of sovereign states, because Greenland is an autonomous part of the Kingdom of Denmark, not a country of its own. Denmark itself covers about 43,000 square kilometres.

The same rule applies to every list you find online. Antarctica is larger than Australia and belongs to nobody. French Guiana sits in South America and is part of France. Counting countries means first deciding what a country is. CountryRush works with 195: the 193 member states of the United Nations plus the two observer states, Vatican City and Palestine.

Why the map lies

On the usual world map, the Mercator projection, Greenland looks roughly the size of Africa. In reality it fits into Africa fourteen times. The projection distorts area more the further you move from the equator. Russia and Canada gain, Brazil and the DR Congo lose.

That explains a good share of the wrong intuitions. Sorting countries by feel means sorting by the map on the classroom wall, not by square kilometres. When you hesitate between two countries in a quiz, correct for the distortion: anything near a pole is smaller than it looks, anything near the equator is bigger.

Sources