United Kingdom | country in Western Europe

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland or simply the United Kingdom (UK) is a sovereign country in Western Europe. It is a constitutional monarchy that is made up of four separate countries: England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It is a member of the United Nations, the Commonwealth, NATO, the G8, and formerly the EU. It had the sixth largest economy in the world by nominal GDP in 2019.

Around 66 million people live in the UK (2018). They can be divided into four big nationalities based on the countries where they live (or where they were born or their ancestry).

• England is the biggest country, where most people in the UK live. People who live in England are called English. Their native language is called English, which is spoken by most people in England.
• Scotland, north of England, is the second biggest country. People who live there are called Scottish, and a Scottish person may be called a Scottish. Some speak a language other than English: Scottish Gaelic, a Gaelic language. Scottish English, on the other hand, is a version of English.
• Wales is to the west of England. Its people are called Welsh and they have their own Celtic language which is also called Welsh. Not everyone in Wales can speak Welsh, but almost everyone can speak English.
• Northern Ireland is the smallest country. Unlike the other three countries, it is not on the island of Great Britain: it is part of the island called Ireland. Northern Ireland takes up about a sixth of Ireland (with the Republic of Ireland taking up the remainder). People who live in Northern Ireland are either Irish, British, or Northern Irish. The people who live here usually speak English.

About 95 percent of the UK's population are English speakers. 5.5 per cent of the population speak languages brought to the UK as a result of relatively recent immigration.

The UK has many cities. London is the biggest city in the UK and is the nation's capital city. There are also other big cities in England including Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Bristol and Newcastle upon Tyne. Scotland has the big cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Cardiff and Swansea are in Wales and Derry and Belfast is in Northern Ireland.

Between the 17th and mid 20th-centuries, Britain was a world power. It became a colonial empire that controlled large areas of Africa, Asia, North America and Oceania. At its height in 1922, more than 458 million people lived in the British Empire, one-fifth of the Earth's population. Its area was 13,012,000 square miles: almost a quarter of the Earth's land area. The empire was sometimes called 'the empire on which the sun never sets', meaning it is always daytime someplace in the empire. Almost all countries left and became independent from the empire in the 20th century, although Britain keeps links with most countries of its former empire.