What is the largest country in the world?

By land area, Russia is the largest country in the world, and it is not close: it covers about 6.6 million square miles, spans eleven time zones, and stretches across both Europe and Asia, making it so vast that when it is morning on its western edge it is already evening in the east. Russia is nearly twice the size of the next-largest country, and it alone covers more than a ninth of all the land on Earth. After Russia, the largest countries by area are Canada, then the United States and China (which trade places depending on how certain territories are counted), then Brazil and Australia. These giants dwarf everyone else; the top few countries hold a large share of the planet's land between them.

It is worth separating the two ways people mean largest, because area and population give completely different answers. The most populous countries are India and China, each with well over a billion people, followed by the United States, Indonesia, and Pakistan, and India recently overtook China as the most populous of all. Russia, despite its enormous size, ranks only around ninth in population, because much of its territory is cold, remote Siberian land that is sparsely inhabited, so it is a country with vast space and comparatively few people. So the honest answer depends on the question: Russia is the largest country by land, by a dominant margin, while India is the largest by population. And a final technicality for the pedants: if you count Antarctica or the ocean, those exceed any country, but among sovereign nations, Russia owns the land title decisively.