Norway 🇳🇴

Norway is an independent state in Northern Europe, and a member of the United Nations. Its full official name is Kingdom of Norway. Its seat of government is Oslo.

It is home to roughly 5.6 million people, placing it 118th of 249 by population — between Liberia above it and Slovakia below. Among the 16 entries in Northern Europe it ranks 3rd by area and 5th by population.

It covers 323,802 km², which ranks it 70th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Malaysia and just ahead of Ivory Coast. That makes it almost exactly the same size as Vietnam.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 62.0° north, 10.0° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 6,902 km from the equator, in what geographers would call high-latitude latitudes.

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

It borders 3 neighbours: Finland, Sweden and Russia. The largest of them by area is Russia, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 159.7 million people.

It has both a coastline and land borders, which is the most common arrangement of all.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 17 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

Officially it is multilingual, listing Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Sami. Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Sami are listed for no other entry in this dataset, which makes them effectively unique to Norway.

Someone from Norway is a Norwegian.

Against Europe as a whole it is the 24th most populous of 53 entries, and it accounts for 5.1% of everyone living in Northern Europe.

Norway does not have the Norwegian krone to itself. It is one of 2 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is NOK, 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 NOK travels further than you might expect.

Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Sami are listed for Norway and for no other entry on this site. A language confined to one country is unusual, and it is normally a sign of long isolation or of deliberate revival.

Zoom in from the world to Northern Europe and Norway sits 5th of 16 by population and 3rd by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Finland just above and Ireland just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇫🇮 Finland
• 🇮🇪 Ireland
• 🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Put next to every other entry on this site, Norway ranks 70th of 249 by area and 118th by population. That works out at 0.22% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.069% 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 Norway in the size ordering are Malaysia at 330,803 km² and Ivory Coast at 322,463 km², against Norway's 323,802 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Norway averages 17 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it thinly settled by global standards — 211th 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 Norwegian krone (kr, NOK). It is issued for Norway alone.

Its internet country code is .no. Calls from overseas start with +47. Standard country codes: no and NOR.

Oslo is the city to remember for this country.

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.