For other uses see Country (disambiguation).
Country ([1] or ) may refer to the territory of a state, or to a smaller, or former, political division of a geographical region. In another meaning of the word, the country (or countryside) is also a term used to refer to rural areas. Usually, but not always, a country coincides with a sovereign territory and is associated with a state, nation and government.
In common usage, the term country is used in the sense of both nations and states, with definitions varying. In some cases it is used to refer both to states and to other political entities,[2] [3]