Jordan 🇯🇴

Jordan lies in Western Asia, part of Asia. Treaties and official documents call it Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Its seat of government is Amman.

It covers 89,342 km², which ranks it 112th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Portugal and just ahead of Serbia. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is almost exactly the same size as Portugal.

It is home to roughly 11.6 million people, placing it 83rd of 249 by population — between Haiti above it and the Dominican Republic below. Within Western Asia alone it is the 7th largest of 17 and the 6th most populous.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 31.0° north, 36.0° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 3,451 km from the equator, in what geographers would call subtropical latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Morocco and Bermuda — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

Its land neighbours number 5: Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Syria. The largest of them by area is Saudi Arabia, while the most populous is Iraq. Together those neighbours hold about 121.3 million people.

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

Spread across 89,342 km², that works out at about 129 people per square kilometre, which makes it more crowded than the typical entry on this list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

Officially it is monolingual: Arabic. Another 24 entries list Arabic too — among them Algeria, Bahrain, Chad and the Comoros.

The demonym is Jordanian, so residents are Jordanians.

Against Asia as a whole it is the 27th most populous of 50 entries, and it accounts for 3.8% of everyone living in Western Asia.

Zoom in from the world to Western Asia and Jordan sits 6th of 17 by population and 7th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Syria just above and United Arab Emirates just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇸🇾 Syria
• 🇦🇪 United Arab Emirates
• 🇹🇷 Türkiye

Jordan does not have the Jordanian dinar to itself. It is one of 2 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is JOD, and the other one is listed below. A shared currency usually points at something real — a monetary union, a currency board, a former colonial administration, or a small economy pegging itself to a large neighbour's money — and it means a price quoted in JOD travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. Arabic is listed for 25 entries here, Jordan 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.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Jordan ranks 112th of 249 by area and 83rd by population. That works out at 0.060% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.14% 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 Jordan in the size ordering are Portugal at 92,090 km² and Serbia at 88,361 km², against Jordan's 89,342 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Jordan averages 129 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 97th 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.

The currency is the Jordanian dinar (د.ا, JOD). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Jordan.

Its internet country code is .jo. To phone it from abroad you dial +962. In ISO terms it is jo in two letters and JOR in three.

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

As a sovereign state it is among the 192 UN members listed here. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.