No sovereign country in the world begins with the letter W. Along with X, it is one of only two letters of the English alphabet that starts no country's name — and unlike X, W gets close repeatedly, which is why the question keeps being asked.
Wales: a country, but not a sovereign state
Wales is the answer most people give, and the reason it is wrong turns on a genuine ambiguity in the word "country" rather than a mistake about geography.
Wales is routinely and correctly called a country. It has a distinct legal history, its own language with official status, a devolved parliament in Cardiff — the Senedd, which has held primary law-making powers since 2011 — and it fields national teams in football and rugby that compete separately from England's. What it does not have is sovereignty. Wales is one of the four constituent countries of the United Kingdom, and it is the United Kingdom that holds the UN seat, issues the passports, conducts the foreign policy and appears on lists of the world's roughly 195 states.
So when a quiz asks for countries beginning with W, it is almost always asking for sovereign states, and Wales is not one. If it were counted, England and Scotland would have to be counted too, and the world total would need rewriting from the top. Wales was annexed to the English crown by the Laws in Wales Acts of the 1530s, and the last Welsh-ruled principality ended with the Edwardian conquest in 1283 — it has not been an independent state at any point since.
There is a neat twist here that undercuts the answer twice over. In Welsh, Wales is not a W word at all: it is Cymru. The name Wales comes from Old English wealas, a term the Anglo-Saxons applied to the Britons they encountered, related to the same root that gives Cornwall and Wallonia. So the most popular W answer is a W only in English, and only because of a label applied from outside.
Western Sahara: sovereignty genuinely unresolved
Western Sahara is the strongest W candidate, and its exclusion is not a technicality about the word "country" but an unsettled international dispute.
- Area: about 266,000 km² of Atlantic coast and desert, south of Morocco
- Population: roughly 600,000, heavily concentrated in Laayoune and a few coastal towns
- Status: listed by the United Nations as a non-self-governing territory — the last one in Africa
Spain withdrew in 1975. Morocco has administered most of the territory since, including virtually all the coast and the large phosphate deposits at Bou Craa, separated from the interior by a sand-and-minefield berm running well over 2,000 km. The Polisario Front proclaimed the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, which is recognised by a substantial number of states and is a full member of the African Union, but not of the United Nations. A referendum on self-determination has been promised since the 1991 ceasefire and has never been held; a large Sahrawi refugee population has lived in camps near Tindouf in Algeria for most of five decades.
The berm is worth picturing, because it makes the dispute legible on a map. It runs roughly north-east to south-west across the territory, and it partitions it functionally: Morocco controls everything to the west, including the entire Atlantic coast, the towns, the phosphate mine and the fisheries. Polisario administers the thinly populated strip to the east, usually called the Free Zone, which is mostly open desert along the Algerian and Mauritanian frontiers. Almost all the people and all the economic value sit on the Moroccan side of the line, which is a large part of why the stalemate has lasted.
Note that even if Western Sahara were universally recognised tomorrow, it would still not be a W country under its own preferred name: the Sahrawi republic's name begins with S. Our Western Sahara guide sets out the dispute in more detail.
West Germany, and the other Ws that expired
W has held real sovereign states — just not recently:
- West Germany — the Federal Republic of Germany was universally called West Germany in English between 1949 and 1990, and it was unquestionably a sovereign state with a UN seat, a currency and an army. Reunification did not end that state so much as extend it eastward, and the informal W name simply stopped being needed. Note the catch: its formal name always began with F or G, never W.
- Wallachia — a principality on the lower Danube for some five centuries, until it merged with Moldavia in 1859 to form what became Romania.
- Württemberg — a kingdom in its own right until 1918, now folded into the German state of Baden-Württemberg.
- Westphalia — a Napoleonic-era kingdom, and the place that gave its name to the 1648 treaties usually credited with establishing the modern idea of state sovereignty. There is a certain irony in Westphalia not being a sovereign state.
The West Germany case is the instructive one, because it shows where the Ws actually come from. English-language informal names produce them readily — West Germany, West Pakistan, the West Indies Federation, West Africa — while formal state names almost never do. A directional prefix is something outsiders and administrators apply; it is rarely what a state calls itself once it can choose.
The smaller W territories
Three more entities get raised, and all are dependencies or disputed areas rather than states:
- Wallis and Futuna — a French overseas collectivity in the South Pacific, population around 11,000, where three traditional kingdoms operate within the French state. It is the closest thing to a W entry on a list of the world's territories.
- Wake Island — an unincorporated US territory in the Pacific, with an airfield and no permanent civilian population.
- West Bank — part of the Palestinian territories; Palestine's own name begins with P, and its statehood is itself contested.
A fourth occasionally appears in older quiz books: the Windward Islands, a British colonial grouping in the Caribbean that has since resolved into the separate states of Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada and Dominica.
Why W runs dry in English — but not in Polish
W is a peculiarity of the Germanic and West Slavic languages. It exists in English, German, Dutch and Polish, and is largely absent from the Romance languages — which matters enormously, because Spanish, Portuguese, French and Latin supplied a huge share of the world's official place names during the colonial period. In Spanish and Italian, W is treated as a foreign letter and appears almost exclusively in loanwords.
Beyond that, W-initial vocabulary in English is dominated by directional and descriptive words: west, white, water, wood. Those make excellent region names and poor country names, because states rarely keep a purely directional label once they are independent and get to choose. The ones that started out that way mostly renamed themselves — Northern Rhodesia became Zambia, South West Africa became Namibia, Upper Volta became Burkina Faso.
German supplies the other half of the explanation, and it is a near-miss of its own. German is full of W place names — Wien, Warschau, Weimar, Westfalen, Württemberg — but the German-speaking states that survived into the modern era call themselves Deutschland, Österreich and Schweiz, none of which is a W in German or in English. The one W-named German polity that lasted, Württemberg, was absorbed into a larger state in 1918. Wallonia, the French-speaking southern region of Belgium, shares its root with Wales and is likewise a region rather than a state. Everywhere the letter appears in European geography, it appears one administrative level below sovereignty.
The sharpest illustration that this is about English and not about the world comes from Polish, where the letter is entirely productive for country names. In Polish, Italy is Włochy, Hungary is Węgry, the United Kingdom is Wielka Brytania, Venezuela is Wenezuela, Vietnam is Wietnam and the Vatican is Watykan. A Polish speaker asked to name countries beginning with W has half a dozen ready answers. The gap is in the English list, not in the map.
What to say when the question comes up
The complete and correct answer is that there are none, and that W shares that status only with X. Every other letter of the alphabet has at least one sovereign state, down to the single entries for Q and Y.
If the person asking wants something rather than nothing, the ranked near-misses are worth knowing: Western Sahara is the only one whose sovereignty is genuinely undecided; Wales is a country in the everyday sense but not a state; West Germany was a real state with an unreal name; and Wallis and Futuna is the only W entity that appears on standard lists of territories at all. Which of those counts depends entirely on what the question means by "country" — a problem that turns out to affect the total as well, as our guide to how many countries there are in the world explains.