Kuwait 🇰🇼

Kuwait is a country in Western Asia, one of the 17 entries this site files under that subregion. The long form of the name is State of Kuwait. Its capital, Kuwait City, shares its name with the country itself — a giveaway that this is a city-state or something close to one.

Around 4.9 million people live there, placing it 127th of 249 by population — between Costa Rica above it and Panama below. Within Western Asia alone it is the 13th largest of 17 and the 13th most populous.

By land area it covers 17,818 km², which ranks it 158th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Fiji and just ahead of Eswatini. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is about half again the size of Qatar.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 29.5° north, 45.8° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 3,284 km from the equator, in what geographers would call subtropical latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Algeria, Nepal and Bhutan — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

2 countries share a land border with it: Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The largest of them by area is Saudi Arabia, while the most populous is Iraq. Together those neighbours hold about 81.3 million people.

Unlike its landlocked neighbours it reaches the sea directly, while also sharing land frontiers.

Spread across 17,818 km², that works out at about 275 people per square kilometre, which makes it densely populated. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

Someone from Kuwait is a Kuwaiti.

Officially it is monolingual: Arabic. Arabic is one of the widely shared official languages here, listed by 24 other entries including Algeria, Bahrain, Chad and the Comoros.

Inside Asia it places 40th of 50 by population, and it accounts for 1.6% of everyone living in Western Asia.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Kuwait ranks 158th of 249 by area and 127th by population. That works out at 0.012% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.060% 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 Kuwait in the size ordering are Fiji at 18,272 km² and Eswatini at 17,364 km², against Kuwait's 17,818 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Kuwait averages 275 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it densely settled by global standards — 52nd 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.

Zoom in from the world to Western Asia and Kuwait sits 13th of 17 by population and 13th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Oman just above and Georgia 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.

• 🇴🇲 Oman
• 🇬🇪 Georgia
• 🇹🇷 Türkiye

The Kuwaiti dinar (KWD) is used only in Kuwait 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. Arabic is listed for 25 entries here, Kuwait 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.

The currency is the Kuwaiti dinar (د.ك, KWD). That currency appears nowhere else on this list.

Its internet country code is .kw. To phone it from abroad you dial +965. Standard country codes: kw and KWT.

It holds a seat at the United Nations, one of 192 entries here that do. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.