How many countries are there in the world?

The most widely cited number is 195, which comes from a clear source: the 193 member states of the United Nations, plus two non-member observer states, the Holy See (Vatican City) and Palestine. That 195 is the standard answer for quizzes and most official purposes, because UN membership is the closest thing the world has to an agreed-upon list of sovereign countries. So if you need one number, 195 is the safe one.

But the honest answer is that there is no single correct count, because what qualifies as a country is genuinely disputed in a handful of cases. Taiwan functions as an independent country with its own government, military, currency, and passport, and many people consider it one, but it is not a UN member because China claims it, so most counts exclude it, controversially. Kosovo declared independence and is recognized by many countries but not all, and not by the UN, so it floats in and out of counts. Places like Western Sahara, and various partially recognized breakaway territories, complicate things further, and some lists reference an older figure of 196 by adding Taiwan. The number also is not fixed over time: countries split (South Sudan became the world's newest UN member in 2011), merge, or dissolve, so the count genuinely changes. So the truthful response is that 195 is the standard answer based on UN membership, but the real number is fuzzy at the edges because sovereignty is partly a matter of recognition and politics, not a clean objective fact, and a few territories are countries or not depending on who is counting.