Random Country Generator

How this random country generator works

You want a country and you do not want to choose it yourself. Maybe it is for a quiz, maybe you are picking somewhere to read about tonight, maybe you are settling an argument. Press Generate and your browser picks one. Nothing is sent anywhere. Change the Number box and you get that many, all different.

Three filters narrow things before the pick happens:

• Starts with: one letter, and you only get countries beginning with it.
• Contains: a few letters, and you only get countries with that string inside the name.
• Ends with: one letter, and you only get countries ending with it.

Bhutan, Costa Rica, Estonia, Fiji, Ghana, Iceland, Nepal, Paraguay, Tuvalu, Vietnam.

A Himalayan kingdom, a Pacific atoll nation with fewer residents than a small market town, and a set of countries that had no independent existence at all a hundred years ago. Which raises a question almost nobody who runs one of these tools can answer: how many countries are there?

What actually makes something a country

Here is the thing that surprises people. There is no office anywhere that decides what is a country and publishes the list. There are several offices, they keep several lists, and the lists do not match.

The nearest thing to a legal test is Article 1 of the Montevideo Convention, signed in Uruguay in 1933. A state, it says, should have four things: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states.

There is no minimum population. There is no requirement that the borders be undisputed. And the Convention adds one sentence that has been argued about ever since: the political existence of the state is independent of recognition by other states.

That is the declaratory theory. A state exists because it meets the test, and other countries can either notice or not.

Against it sits the constitutive theory, which says an entity becomes a state when other states treat it as one. In practice the world runs on a mixture: entities can meet all four Montevideo criteria and still be kept out of the rooms where states meet, because recognition is a political act rather than a measurement.

So a country is not a fact about the land. It is an entry in a register, and which register you open decides what number you get.

193, 195, 249: three answers, all correct

193 is the number of member states of the United Nations. This is the strictest, cleanest number you can use. If a country is on this list, it has a seat and a vote in the General Assembly. There is no ambiguity and no argument.

195 adds the two permanent observer states, which have standing at the UN without a vote. This is the figure most atlases and most schoolteachers use, and it is where the familiar phrase "195 countries" comes from.

249 is how many entries the International Organization for Standardization keeps in ISO 3166, the standard that gives every country its two-letter code. But read what ISO says it is coding. Not countries. Countries, dependencies, and areas of geographical interest.

So the gap between 193 and 249 is not a disagreement about which countries exist. It is a different question being answered. The UN is asking "who is a member?" ISO is asking "what places need a code so that computers can file post, money and passports?"

Those are not the same question, and neither list is wrong.

Antarctica has a country code

ISO 3166 assigns the code AQ to Antarctica. It covers the continent and every scrap of land and ice shelf south of sixty degrees south.

Antarctica has no government, no capital, no permanent population, and no seat at the United Nations. It fails every one of the four Montevideo criteria, and it has a country code, because software needs somewhere to file a research station's mailing address and inventing a code was easier than not.

Once you notice this, the whole gap makes sense. Dozens of ISO's entries are places with a code and no seat. Some are inhabited territories with their own governments. Some are uninhabited islands. One is a continent with penguins on it.

ISO is fairly blunt about the reasoning. As a general rule it does not assign codes to places that are not UN member states, though it will assign them to dependencies of member states, provided the place is physically separate.

So the next time somebody tells you there are 249 countries, they have read the ISO list and missed the sentence explaining what it is a list of.

Tuvalu comes up as often as China

One entry, one chance. That is how a random draw works, and it produces something quietly strange.

China has more than a billion people. Tuvalu has roughly the population of a large secondary school. In the General Assembly they have one vote each, which is the principle the United Nations was built on and the thing that makes it unlike almost every other institution on Earth.

A random country generator reproduces that principle by accident. Every country is one row. Nobody gets weighted by population, or by wealth, or by how often they appear in the news.

Which is either the fairest thing about this tool or the most absurd, depending on your mood. Generate twenty countries and count how many you could place on a map. Then consider that every one of them has the same vote as the ones you could.

Ways people actually use this

• Geography quizzes. Pull ten countries and ask for a capital, a flag, or a neighbour for each one. Random beats alphabetical, because alphabetical means everybody learns Afghanistan and nobody ever reaches Zimbabwe.
• Reading roulette. Generate one country a week and read something written by somebody who lives there. You will run out of weeks before you run out of countries.
• Breaking a travel deadlock. Not for booking. For when you have stared at a map for an hour and made no progress.
• Naming things. Sports teams, campaigns, test data, seating plans. A country name is a ready-made label with a story attached.
• Testing software. If you are building anything with a country dropdown, generating twenty at random is a fast way to find out that your form breaks on Côte d'Ivoire and São Tomé.

Getting more out of the filters

• Type guinea into Contains and four countries come back: Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, and Papua New Guinea. Four countries, three continents, one word.
• Type stan for the Persian suffix meaning "place of", and land for its Germanic cousin. They are the same idea in two language families.
• Starts with reads the first character of the name as stored, so a country written with "The" in front will turn up under T.
• If a filter gives you fewer countries than you asked for, loosen it and run again.

Questions people ask

How many countries are there in the world?

193, if you mean sovereign states with a seat at the United Nations. 195 if you include the two permanent observer states. Anything higher is counting dependencies and territories, and the person quoting it should say so.

Is there a legal definition of a country?

The closest is Article 1 of the 1933 Montevideo Convention: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. It also says statehood does not depend on recognition, which is a position many governments do not accept in practice.

Why isn't Antarctica a country?

Because it has no government and no permanent population. It has a code in ISO 3166 and it has research stations, but a country code is a filing convenience, not a nationality.

Does every country have the same chance of coming up?

Yes. One entry, one chance. Tuvalu turns up exactly as often as China, which is also how the UN General Assembly votes.

Can the same country come up twice?

Not within one press. Ask for ten and you get ten different countries. Press Generate again and everything is back in play.

References

1. United Nations member states
2. ISO 3166 country codes
3. Standard country or area codes, UN Statistics Division
4. Convention on Rights and Duties of States, Montevideo, 1933