Eight sovereign countries begin with the letter E: Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Eswatini and Ethiopia. A ninth appears on some lists as East Timor, which has been officially Timor-Leste since 2002 — and one of the eight, Eswatini, only entered the letter in 2018.
The letter that keeps changing membership
E is unusually unstable. Two of its eight members have joined or changed within living memory, and one left:
- Eswatini was Swaziland until April 2018, when King Mswati III announced the change on the fiftieth anniversary of independence — partly, he said, to stop the country being confused with Switzerland. Overnight the letter S lost a member and E gained one.
- Eritrea did not exist as an independent state before 1993. It was an Italian colony, then British-administered, then federated and annexed by Ethiopia, and won independence after a thirty-year war.
- East Germany — the German Democratic Republic — was universally called East Germany in English from 1949 to 1990. Like West Germany, it was a real sovereign state with an informal directional name that never appeared in its official title.
So a list of E countries compiled in 1990 would have read differently in three places from one compiled today.
The East Timor question
Timor-Leste occupies the eastern half of the island of Timor, plus the enclave of Oecusse on the western side. It restored independence in 2002 after Portuguese colonisation, a brief 1975 declaration of independence, and 24 years of Indonesian occupation — making it one of the youngest countries in the world.
The naming is the issue. Timor-Leste is the official name in Portuguese, one of the country's two official languages, and it is what the United Nations uses. East Timor is the plain English translation of exactly the same words — leste means east — and remains in common use. Whether the country belongs under E or T depends purely on which of the two you treat as the name. Formal lists put it under T; older and more informal ones put it under E. Our Timor-Leste guide uses the official form.
Five African E countries, no two alike
Ethiopia is the giant of the group: roughly 1.1 million km² and well over 120 million people, the second most populous country in Africa. It is also the only African state never to have been formally colonised — Italy occupied it briefly from 1936 to 1941 but never established recognised sovereignty — and it keeps its own calendar and its own clock, along with a Christian tradition dating to the fourth century. The Ethiopian highlands are the source of the Blue Nile, which supplies most of the water reaching Egypt.
Egypt, at roughly 1 million km² and over 110 million people, is the other heavyweight, and effectively a linear country: the overwhelming majority of Egyptians live on the Nile's banks and in its delta, which is a small fraction of the national territory. The rest is desert. Egypt straddles two continents, with the Sinai Peninsula in Asia, and controls the Suez Canal.
Eritrea took the Red Sea coast with it when it separated from Ethiopia in 1993 — the single most consequential fact about both countries, because it left Ethiopia landlocked and dependent on Djibouti's port, and gave Eritrea a coastline of well over a thousand kilometres.
Eswatini is one of Africa's smallest states at about 17,400 km², landlocked between South Africa and Mozambique, and one of the world's last absolute monarchies. South Africa wraps around three of its four sides, with only a short eastern frontier facing Mozambique, and it packs a striking range of altitude into a small area — from cool, wet highveld in the west, down through a middleveld, to hot lowveld bush in the east. Both Eswatini and Lesotho survived as separate states because they were British protectorates rather than parts of the Union of South Africa, which is why two small monarchies persist inside southern Africa's largest economy's sphere.
Equatorial Guinea is the odd one out linguistically: the only sovereign African state with Spanish as an official language, a legacy of Spanish rather than British, French or Portuguese colonisation. It is also geographically split, with the capital Malabo on the island of Bioko while most of the population lives on the mainland region of Río Muni. Despite the name, no part of it sits on the equator.
Estonia stands alone in Europe
- Capital: Tallinn
- Area: about 45,300 km²
- Population: roughly 1.3 million
Estonia is the only European country beginning with E, and the smallest of the three Baltic states. Roughly half of it is forested and it has more than 2,000 islands, most of them tiny. The Estonian language is not Indo-European: it belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic family, making it a relative of Finnish and a distant one of Hungarian, and unrelated to Latvian and Lithuanian next door despite the shared regional label.
Independent from 1918, occupied and annexed by the Soviet Union from 1940, and independent again from 1991, Estonia then built one of the most digitised public administrations in the world — online voting, digital identity for essentially all state services, and an e-residency scheme open to non-residents. For a country of 1.3 million people it has an outsized presence in discussions of digital government.
Geographically Estonia is also the flattest of the Baltic states and among the flattest countries in Europe: its highest point, Suur Munamägi, reaches only about 318 metres. Much of the north coast is fringed by the Baltic Klint, a limestone escarpment running east from Sweden through Estonia into Russia. Like Finland across the gulf, Estonia is still rising slowly as the land rebounds from the ice sheets, and the west-coast islands of Saaremaa and Hiiumaa are gaining a little ground each century as a result.
Ecuador and El Salvador: the two American Es
Ecuador is named after the equator, which crosses it just north of Quito. At about 256,000 km² it packs in Pacific coast, Andean highlands and Amazon basin, plus the Galápagos Islands roughly 900 km offshore — the archipelago whose endemic species shaped Darwin's thinking. Because the Earth bulges at the equator, the summit of Ecuador's Chimborazo is the point on the planet's surface furthest from its centre, further out than Everest's peak.
El Salvador is the smallest country in mainland Central America at about 21,000 km², and the only one with no Caribbean coastline — it faces the Pacific only. It is densely populated, seismically very active, and sits on a volcanic arc that gives it fertile soils and frequent earthquakes. In 2001 it abandoned its own currency for the US dollar.
Egypt and Ethiopia are arguing over the same river
The two largest E countries are linked by a single hydrological fact, and it makes them the most consequential pairing in the letter.
Roughly six-tenths or more of the water that reaches Egypt arrives via the Blue Nile, which rises at Lake Tana in the Ethiopian highlands and carries the seasonal monsoon runoff north. Egypt, with over 110 million people and almost no rainfall, depends on that flow existing and arriving on schedule. Ethiopia, with a comparable population and substantial unmet electricity demand, has the headwaters.
The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, on the Blue Nile near the Sudanese border, is the largest hydroelectric project in Africa. Ethiopia's position is that a country cannot be asked to leave its principal water resource undeveloped; Egypt's is that its entire population is downstream of a structure it does not control, governed by colonial-era agreements Ethiopia never signed. Years of negotiation involving Sudan as the third riparian state have not produced a binding operating agreement.
The geography is worth stating plainly, because it explains why the dispute is so intractable: Egypt has the population and the historic claim, Ethiopia has the altitude and the rainfall, and neither can relocate. It is the clearest example anywhere of a river basin where the upstream and downstream interests are both existential — and it happens to run between the two biggest countries in this letter.
What the E names actually mean
The letter has an unusual concentration of descriptive and devotional names rather than names of peoples:
- Ecuador — Spanish for equator.
- El Salvador — the Saviour.
- Equatorial Guinea — a directional qualifier plus Guinea, a regional name shared with three other states.
- Eritrea — from the Greek Erythra Thalassa, the Red Sea.
- Eswatini — land of the Swazis, in siSwati.
- Estonia — from a name applied by outsiders to the region's inhabitants; Estonians call their country Eesti.
That mix explains part of the letter's instability. Names that describe a location or express a colonial-era sentiment are exactly the names most likely to be replaced when a country reconsiders how it wishes to be known — which is how Swaziland became Eswatini, and why the same process has reshuffled other letters, as our list of countries that changed their names shows.
