Five sovereign countries plainly begin with K: Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kiribati, Kuwait and Kyrgyzstan. Two more — North Korea and South Korea — appear under K on any list that files them as "Korea, North" and "Korea, South", which is why the answer is given as five or seven depending on the source.
Why the Koreas are the problem
Neither Korean state calls itself Korea. The northern state's official name is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the southern one's is the Republic of Korea, which would file them under D and R. English-language practice instead inverts them to put the shared element first — Korea, North and Korea, South — because readers look for them together, and that inversion is what puts them under K.
The UN member-state list uses the full official names. The CIA World Factbook uses the inverted forms. Most atlases index them under K. There is no single correct answer; there is a convention, and it varies. If a quiz asks how many countries start with K, five is the safer answer and seven is defensible with an explanation.
Worth adding: in Korean, neither country uses a name resembling "Korea" at all. The South calls itself Hanguk and the North Chosŏn — different names for the country, not merely different political labels, and one of the more striking cases where the international name matches neither party's own. Our guides to South Korea and North Korea cover them separately.
Three Central Asian republics, all ending in -stan
The letter's centre of gravity is Central Asia, where two of the five sit side by side.
Kazakhstan is the ninth-largest country in the world at about 2.72 million km² — larger than all of Western Europe — with only around 20 million people, which gives it one of the lowest population densities anywhere. It is also the largest landlocked country on Earth, though it borders the Caspian Sea, which is a lake by most definitions. Most of it is steppe, semi-desert and desert. It holds the Baikonur Cosmodrome, leased to Russia, from which every crewed Soviet and Russian spaceflight has launched, and it contains what remains of the Aral Sea, the most cited case of human-caused environmental collapse anywhere: Soviet irrigation diversions from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya shrank the lake to a fraction of its former extent.
Kyrgyzstan is the mountain counterpart: about 200,000 km², with over 90 per cent of the country above 1,500 metres and peaks in the Tien Shan exceeding 7,000 metres. Issyk-Kul, at around 1,600 metres altitude, is one of the largest and deepest mountain lakes in the world and does not freeze despite its elevation, thanks to slight salinity and thermal activity. Its borders with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan include several enclaves and exclaves — pockets of one country entirely inside another — a legacy of Soviet-era boundary drawing in the densely populated Fergana Valley.
Both were Soviet republics until 1991, both have Turkic-speaking majorities, and both retain substantial Russian-speaking populations. The -stan suffix is Persian for place or land, so the names mean roughly land of the Kazakhs and land of the Kyrgyz.
Kenya sits on the equator and on the Rift
- Capital: Nairobi
- Area: about 580,000 km²
- Population: roughly 56 million
- Highest point: Mount Kenya, about 5,199 metres
The equator runs through Kenya, and yet the country has permanent glaciers — Mount Kenya's summit, an eroded volcanic plug, is high enough to hold ice within a few dozen kilometres of the equatorial line, though those glaciers have retreated dramatically and are expected to disappear. That altitude range, from Indian Ocean coast to over 5,000 metres, is why Kenya's climate varies so sharply over short distances: Nairobi at about 1,795 metres is temperate enough to need heating at night while Mombasa is tropical.
The Great Rift Valley cuts north to south through the country, studded with lakes — Turkana, Nakuru, Naivasha, Magadi — several of them alkaline and supporting enormous flamingo populations. The Maasai Mara, contiguous with Tanzania's Serengeti, hosts the annual wildebeest migration. The Turkana basin has produced some of the most important hominin fossils found anywhere, which is a large part of why East Africa is described as the cradle of humankind.
Kuwait and Kiribati: opposite kinds of small
The two smallest K countries make a useful pair, because both are small and vulnerable but in completely different ways.
- Kuwait — about 17,800 km² at the head of the Persian Gulf, population roughly 4.3 million, with some of the largest oil reserves in the world relative to its size. It is flat, almost entirely desert, and depends on desalination for water. Its vulnerability is political: it was invaded and occupied by Iraq in 1990, and it sits between Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
- Kiribati — about 811 km² of land scattered across roughly 3.5 million km² of the central Pacific, in 33 atolls and reef islands, population roughly 130,000. Its vulnerability is physical: most of its land is only a couple of metres above sea level, which makes it one of the countries most exposed to sea-level rise anywhere. It has purchased land in Fiji partly as a hedge.
Kiribati also holds a distinction created by a decision rather than by nature. Its islands straddled the international date line, putting parts of the country a day apart from each other, so in 1995 Kiribati moved the line east to bring the whole nation onto one date. That relocated the line by a considerable distance and made Kiribati's Line Islands the first inhabited place on Earth to enter each new day — which is why Caroline Island was renamed Millennium Island for the year 2000.
Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan: the steppe and the mountains
The two neighbours are the closest pair in the letter, and their differences are almost entirely a matter of altitude.
Kazakhstan's territory is overwhelmingly low and flat, which historically made it a corridor: the northern route of the Silk Road crossed it, and so did successive waves of steppe cavalry. Flat and empty also made it useful to the Soviet state for things that needed space and distance from populations — Baikonur for rockets, Semipalatinsk for nuclear testing, and the Virgin Lands campaign that ploughed vast areas of steppe for grain with mixed results. Independence in 1991 left Kazakhstan holding a large nuclear arsenal, which it gave up, and an economy resting on oil, gas, uranium and metals.
Kyrgyzstan got the mountains and very little else. Without significant hydrocarbons, its main natural endowments are gold — the Kumtor mine has at times accounted for a large share of national output — and water, since the rivers that irrigate the cotton fields of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan rise in Kyrgyz glaciers. That gives a small, poorer country genuine leverage over larger neighbours, and water-sharing has been a recurring source of friction across the region.
The two also diverged politically. Kazakhstan had one president from independence until 2019; Kyrgyzstan has had several changes of government by street protest, in 2005, 2010 and 2020, which has earned it a reputation as the most politically volatile of the Central Asian republics.
One more shared inheritance: both had their capitals moved or renamed. Kazakhstan shifted its capital from Almaty in the far south-east to Astana in the northern steppe in 1997 — a deliberate move toward the Russian-speaking north — and the city was then renamed Nur-Sultan in 2019 before reverting to Astana in 2022.
Five countries, five continents' worth of range
For a letter with only five clear members, K covers an unusual span:
- Largest to smallest: Kazakhstan is roughly 3,350 times the land area of Kiribati.
- Highest to lowest: Kyrgyzstan's peaks pass 7,400 metres; Kiribati's highest natural point is a few metres of coral sand.
- Landlocked to almost entirely ocean: Kazakhstan is the largest landlocked country in the world; Kiribati is over 99.9 per cent sea by the area it administers.
- What links them: nothing except the letter — and the fact that four of the five gained or regained their independence in the twentieth century's second half.
The K names that are not countries
- Kosovo — declared independence from Serbia in 2008 and is recognised by a large number of states but not by all, and it is not a UN member. Whether it belongs on a list of K countries is a live political question rather than a naming one. See our Kosovo guide.
- Kurdistan — a region spanning parts of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, with an autonomous region in Iraq, but not a state.
- Kashmir — a disputed territory divided between India, Pakistan and China.
- Kaliningrad — a Russian exclave on the Baltic.
- Katanga — briefly attempted secession from Congo in the 1960s; never widely recognised.
- Kampuchea — the name of Cambodia from 1975 to 1989, and a genuine former K country.
Kampuchea is the one to note, because it means K has lost a member within the last forty years — the same churn that removed Zaire from Z and Swaziland from S, and a reminder that these lists are snapshots rather than fixed facts.