At a Glance
Nobody agrees on how many continents there are, and the official list of countries turns out to be a list of UN memberships rather than a list of countries. I ran into both while building the country counter on my travel pages.
Territories like Hong Kong and Kosovo are real places I have slept in, and none of them is a country. My counter had been quietly counting them anyway, because I was printing a number my data provider sent me instead of one I had worked out myself.
My travel pages are full of numbers and statistics. Days on the road, cities slept in, kilometres flown, times around the world. Countries visited.
I did not verify them. My data provider counted it. My page printed what it was given. Then I looked up what the number meant, and my count got different. It seems that nobody agrees on what you are supposed to count, so I dug into it.
How many continents are there
Seven is one answer, and the one most people give. Six is another, if you take the Americas as a single landmass. Six again in the version that treats Europe and Asia as one thing, which they visibly are. Five, if you leave out the one nobody lives on – Antarctica.
All of those are taught as fact somewhere. Children sit exams on them.
My site says seven. Not because I resolved anything. Because I had to put a number on a page and seven is what I grew up with.
A continent sounds like a fact about the planet. It is a fact about your schoolbook.
Antarctica is on my list. It contains no countries, so it sits at zero permanently. A continent I officially can never finish.
Even the continent names are tricky
One continent I called Oceania. Plenty of schoolbooks call it Australia.
Both are defensible. They do not mean the same thing. Australia is a landmass, a single continuous piece of the Earth’s crust. Oceania is the region that includes Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia.
Pick Australia and Fiji, Samoa and Tonga are on no continent at all. Pick Oceania, and the continent is named after no landmass.
The UN, whose country list I lean on for everything else, sidesteps this entirely. It does not use continents. It uses regions, and it draws them differently again.
Then there are the countries that sit on two of them. Russia is in Europe on my site. Turkey is in Asia. Both straddle the line, and I called them opposite ways. Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan I put in Asia. Egypt I put in Africa.
No rule produced any of that. I looked at each one and picked.
The official list
The question about the countries felt like it had a real answer. There is a United Nations (UN). It has members. The members are on a list.
193 members. Plus two permanent observer states, the Holy See and Palestine. 195. That is where the “195 countries” you see everywhere comes from. Worth saying what it measures. It is not a count of countries. It is a count of UN memberships, plus two exceptions.
Look at what the line lets through. The Holy See is in, on observer status, and I have been there. Palestine is in, same status. Taiwan is out, and 23 million people live there. Kosovo is out. The Cook Islands and Niue are not addressed either way. That is the whole resolution. 195 names, fixed, sitting in one place.
The places that are not countries
My provider does not care about any of this. It gives me a flag for every place I have stayed. Territories, dependencies, and special administrative regions arrive looking exactly like Switzerland.
Three of them are in my data. Hong Kong, Gibraltar, Kosovo.
Seven nights in Hong Kong, three in Gibraltar, two in Kosovo. Real places, real borders, real formalities on the way in. None of them a UN country.
Kosovo is its own small mess. Recognised by roughly half the UN, a member of none of it. It has no official country code either. It borrows one from a range reserved for exactly this kind of problem. My provider then sends a different code again, one that belongs to nobody, and I quietly swap it on the way in.
I get other outdated entries from my provider, which I correct. Most of them are dead countries. The Soviet Union is on it. So are Yugoslavia, Swaziland, Serbia and Montenegro. Places that stopped existing, still arriving in my data.
What do you call a country?
Names turned out to be a separate problem from counting, and I did not see that coming.
The official name and the useful name are rarely the same words. The international standard files the Vatican under “the Holy See”, and the UN writes it that way too. Nobody looking for it on my site types that. They type “Vatican City” or just “Vatican”.
Czechia is the short name the country asked the world to use. Czech Republic is still the formal one. Both are correct. People use both. Turkey asked to be called Türkiye and the UN agreed, so the reference data I read names from switched over. Myanmar arrives with Burma in brackets. Hong Kong arrives as Hong Kong SAR China.
None of those are wrong. They are just not what a person calls the place.
Correct and readable are two different requirements, and only one of them can be checked automatically.
So I stopped treating the name as the thing. Every country on my site is held by its two-letter code, not by its name. Nothing in the system decides anything by comparing names, because names move and codes do not. Switzerland is CH, whatever anyone calls it next.
The name is then purely what you read. I take the standard English one and overrule it in favour of my preferences and how I feel people use it. Obviously not the right choice for everyone. Hong Kong loses its suffix. Myanmar loses its brackets. Türkiye goes back to Turkey for an English-speaking reader. Vatican City and Czechia are used like that.
What I did about the counting
The fix is boring, which is the point. One list of 195. Use it for the number and nowhere else.
Everything else about a territory stays. Hong Kong still has its own page on my site. It still shows in the list of places I have been. Its seven nights still count towards my days on the road. It just does not add one to the country total.
The number today
62 countries out of 195. 3 territories on top, listed separately, adding nothing to the total.
I was not counting wrong. I was not counting at all.
That is the part that bothers me, and it is why this is a post rather than a quiet correction. The number sat on my own page, about my own life, on a site I built myself. I never once checked it. It looked like a fact because it was large and it had a flag next to it.
It went down when I fixed it. Nothing is as simple as it looks from the outside, and a counter is about as simple as it gets.
Conclusion
There is no authoritative answer to how many countries or continents exist. There is only a line you draw and then write down. I count the 195 UN members and observers, keep territories visible everywhere else on the site, and identify every country by its code rather than its name, because names move and codes do not.