Poland 🇵🇱

Filed under Europe and more precisely Central Europe, Poland is a sovereign state. Its full official name is Republic of Poland. Its seat of government is Warsaw.

It is home to roughly 36.6 million people, placing it 42nd of 249 by population — between Ukraine above it and Uzbekistan below. Among the 6 entries in Central Europe it ranks 1st by area and 1st by population.

The land area is 312,679 km², which ranks it 72nd of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Ivory Coast and just ahead of Oman. That makes it a fraction smaller than Norway.

The coordinates the dataset gives are 52.0° N, 20.0° E, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 5,789 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

Its land neighbours number 7: Belarus, Czechia, Germany, Lithuania, Russia, Slovakia and Ukraine. The largest of them by area is Russia, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 293.3 million people.

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

Population divided by land area gives roughly 117 people per square kilometre, which makes it more crowded than the typical entry on this list. For comparison, the median entry on this list sits near 91 per square kilometre.

Officially it is monolingual: Polish. No other entry in this dataset lists Polish, so on this list it stands alone.

Someone from Poland is a Polish.

Against Europe as a whole it is the 8th most populous of 53 entries, and it accounts for 50% of everyone living in Central Europe.

Within Central Europe, Poland is the most populous of the 6 entries this site lists, and the largest by area as well. Czechia is next in line by population.

Every entry in Central Europe has its own guide here, so if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time, Czechia is the place to carry on.

• 🇨🇿 Czechia
• 🇵🇱 Poland

The Polish złoty (PLN) is used only in Poland 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.

Polish is listed for Poland 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.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Poland ranks 72nd of 249 by area and 42nd by population. That works out at 0.21% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.45% 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 Poland in the size ordering are Ivory Coast at 322,463 km² and Oman at 309,500 km², against Poland's 312,679 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Poland averages 117 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 103rd 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 Polish złoty (zł, PLN). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Poland.

Warsaw is the city to remember for this country.

Its internet country code is .pl. Calls from overseas start with +48. Standard country codes: pl and POL.

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.