Seven sovereign countries begin with the letter U: Uganda, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, the United States, Uruguay and Uzbekistan. Three of the seven start with the word "United" — the heaviest concentration of a single word anywhere in the alphabet, and not a coincidence.
Why three countries are called United something
All three are unions that kept the fact of union in the name, and each was assembled from parts that had been separate states:
- The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland — the union of the English and Scottish crowns in 1603 and their parliaments in 1707, with Ireland added in 1801 and most of it leaving in 1922. The full name is a description of the constituent parts, which is why it is so long.
- The United States of America — thirteen colonies that had been separately chartered and separately governed, federated in the 1780s. The name asserts a plurality made singular; American usage took most of a century to settle on treating "the United States" as grammatically singular.
- The United Arab Emirates — seven emirates, previously the Trucial States under British protection, federated in 1971. Abu Dhabi and Dubai are the two largest; Ras Al Khaimah joined in 1972, a few months after the others.
The pattern is that a federation of previously distinct polities tends to announce itself as united, and English puts that adjective first. Note the near-misses that would have swelled the letter further: the United Provinces of the Netherlands, the United Arab Republic — Egypt and Syria's short-lived 1958–61 union — and the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves. All are gone, and all would have been U countries.
The three Uniteds, briefly
The United States is about 9.8 million km² including water, roughly 340 million people, and the third or fourth largest country by area depending on how China's and its own territorial waters are counted. It spans the continent plus Alaska and Hawaii, covers six time zones in its states and more with territories, and contains climate zones from Arctic to tropical.
The United Kingdom is about 244,000 km² and roughly 68 million people, made up of four constituent countries — England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — and its only land border is between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Our United Kingdom guide covers the four nations.
The United Arab Emirates is about 84,000 km² and roughly 11 million people, of whom the large majority are foreign nationals. It is largely desert, with the Hajar Mountains in the east and a long Gulf coastline, and it shares the Musandam problem of the region's tangled boundaries: Oman holds an exclave at the tip of the peninsula, and the UAE contains at least one enclave of Omani territory, Madha, which itself contains a UAE enclave inside it.
Three unions, three completely different designs
Sharing a first word conceals how differently the three Uniteds distribute power internally — and the differences are geographic as much as constitutional.
- The United States is a symmetric federation: fifty states with the same constitutional standing, each with its own legislature, courts and residual powers, under a written constitution that is hard to amend. Territorial expansion was continuous for a century, and each new state entered on the same terms as the existing ones.
- The United Kingdom is not a federation at all. Sovereignty rests with the Westminster parliament, there is no codified constitution, and the powers held by Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were devolved by ordinary legislation from the late 1990s — and differ from one another. England alone has no devolved parliament, which produces the asymmetry at the heart of British constitutional argument.
- The United Arab Emirates is a federation of monarchies in which the constituent units retained more than usual. Each emirate keeps ownership of the natural resources within its territory, which matters enormously because Abu Dhabi holds the overwhelming majority of the federation's oil. That single fact — one member with almost all the revenue — shapes the union's politics far more than its formal structure does.
The lesson is that "United" describes a founding event rather than a system. Three countries that announce union in their names have almost nothing in common in how they actually govern the parts.
Ukraine: Europe's largest country by land area
- Capital: Kyiv
- Area: about 603,500 km²
- Population: figures are heavily disputed since 2022; pre-war estimates were around 41 million
Excluding Russia, which spans two continents, Ukraine is the largest country wholly within Europe. Its defining physical feature is soil: the black earth, or chernozem, of the steppe belt is among the most fertile in the world, and it is why Ukraine has been a major exporter of wheat, maize, barley and sunflower oil, and why disruption to its ports has global food-price consequences. The Dnipro river bisects the country north to south and has been dammed into a chain of reservoirs.
Mountains are confined to the edges: the Carpathians in the west and the Crimean range in the south. Crimea itself has been under Russian occupation since 2014, and further territory in the east and south since the full-scale invasion of 2022 — meaning any current statement about Ukraine's effective borders, population or economy is provisional.
Uzbekistan, Uganda, Uruguay: three that share nothing but a letter
Uzbekistan is one of only two doubly landlocked countries in the world — a country whose neighbours are all themselves landlocked, so that reaching an ocean requires crossing at least two borders. Liechtenstein is the other. It is about 449,000 km², roughly 36 million people, and holds the great Silk Road cities of Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva. Like Kazakhstan, it bears responsibility for the Aral Sea's desiccation, since the cotton irrigation that drained the feeder rivers was concentrated on Uzbek land.
Uganda is landlocked in East Africa, about 241,000 km², roughly 48 million people, and holds a substantial share of Lake Victoria, the largest tropical lake in the world and the source of the White Nile. It sits on the equator, but most of the country is a plateau above 1,000 metres, which makes the climate far milder than the latitude implies. Winston Churchill's description of it as the pearl of Africa is quoted often enough that the tourist board uses it. The Rwenzori Mountains on the Congolese border carry glaciers, another equatorial ice anomaly like Kenya's.
Uruguay is the second-smallest country in South America at about 176,000 km², with roughly 3.4 million people, nearly half of them in and around Montevideo. It is the flattest and most temperate of the South American states, essentially a country of rolling grassland with no mountains to speak of — its highest point is barely 500 metres. It has generated a large share of its electricity from renewables, and it is one of the few countries in the world with more cattle than people, by a factor of about three.
The largest and the smallest in one letter
U covers a wider range of state types than most:
- Area: the United States is roughly 55 times Uruguay's size and over 115 times the UAE's.
- Constitutional form: three federations, three unitary republics, and one federation of monarchies.
- Access to the sea: two landlocked states, one of them doubly so; and the country with the third-longest coastline in the world.
- Shared trait: five of the seven have been reshaped by an empire's dissolution — British in three cases, Soviet in two.
Two U countries share the blame for a vanished sea
Uzbekistan and its neighbour Kazakhstan hold between them the remains of the Aral Sea, and it is worth stating what happened because it is the clearest case anywhere of a country's geography being changed by policy within a single lifetime.
The Aral was once among the largest lakes in the world by surface area, fed by the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers flowing down from the Central Asian mountains. From the 1960s, Soviet planners diverted both rivers on a massive scale to irrigate cotton, most of it on what is now Uzbek territory. Cotton is a thirsty crop grown in a desert; the inflow collapsed, and so did the lake. It broke into separate basins, its salinity rose beyond what its fish could survive, and the fishing fleet of Moynaq was left stranded on dry ground tens of kilometres from water.
What remained is a salt desert that the wind lifts into dust storms carrying agricultural chemicals across the region, with documented public-health consequences. Kazakhstan has managed to restore part of the northern basin behind a dam, and fish have returned there; the larger southern portion in Uzbekistan has continued to shrink. Uzbekistan's dependence on cotton — and therefore on the water — is the reason the reversal has been so much harder on its side of the border.
The U that vanished, and the ones that never counted
The letter lost its largest member in living memory. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was the largest country in the world by a wide margin and it filed under U — until December 1991, when it dissolved into fifteen successor states, two of which, Ukraine and Uzbekistan, kept the letter. The United Arab Republic went the same way in 1961. And Upper Volta became Burkina Faso in 1984.
Several U names are not countries at all: Utah is an American state; Ulster is an Irish province, most but not all of which is in Northern Ireland; and the United Nations is an organisation of countries rather than one of them — an error that comes up more often than you might expect. For how the roster of members is counted and disputed, see our guide to how many countries there are in the world.