Guyana 🇬🇾

Guyana is a sovereign country in South America, in the wider region of the Americas. The long form of the name is Co-operative Republic of Guyana. The capital is Georgetown.

Some 831,087 people call it home, placing it 164th of 249 by population — between the Comoros above it and the Solomon Islands below. Among the 13 entries in South America it ranks 9th by area and 10th by population.

Its territory runs to 214,969 km², which ranks it 85th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Laos and just ahead of Belarus. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is a little larger than Belarus.

Its reference point sits at 5.0° north and 59.0° west, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 557 km from the equator, in what geographers would call the equatorial belt.

Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include the Central African Republic, South Sudan and Cameroon.

3 countries share a land border with it: Brazil, Suriname and Venezuela. The largest of them by area is Brazil, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 241.0 million people.

With both a coast and land borders, it has the trade options a landlocked country does not.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 3.9 people per square kilometre, which makes it very thinly populated. The median across all 249 entries here is about 91 per square kilometre.

English is the only official language. English is one of the widely shared official languages here, listed by 90 other entries including American Samoa, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda and Australia.

The demonym is Guyanese, so residents are Guyanese.

Inside the Americas it places 25th of 55 by population, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in South America.

The Guyanese dollar (GYD) is used only in Guyana among the 249 entries on this site. Its own currency is one of the clearest markers of an economy that sets its own monetary policy rather than importing somebody else's.

Language reaches wider still. English is listed for 91 entries here, Guyana among them, so a visitor who speaks it can be understood across a large part of the map. Shared language tends to outlive the empires, trade routes and migrations that spread it, which is why the linguistic map and the political one rarely line up.

Zoom in from the world to South America and Guyana sits 10th of 13 by population and 9th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Uruguay just above and Suriname just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

Brazil is the largest of the group by population, and every entry in South America has its own page here if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time.

• 🇺🇾 Uruguay
• 🇸🇷 Suriname
• 🇧🇷 Brazil

Put next to every other entry on this site, Guyana ranks 85th of 249 by area and 164th by population. That works out at 0.14% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.010% of their combined population. Those denominators matter: this list includes territories and dependencies as well as UN member states, so a rank here is not the same as a rank among sovereign countries.

For a sense of scale, the entries immediately either side of Guyana in the size ordering are Laos at 236,800 km² and Belarus at 207,600 km², against Guyana's 214,969 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Guyana averages 4 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it among the emptiest places on the list — 234th of the 247 entries that have both a population and a measured area. Total area includes inland water, so the true figure for habitable land is higher than this.

It uses the Guyanese dollar ($, GYD). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Guyana.

The top-level domain is .gy. The international dialling code is +592. In ISO terms it is gy in two letters and GUY in three.

Georgetown is the seat of government and the answer most quizzes are looking for.

Guyana is one of the 192 UN member states in this dataset. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.