Singapore 🇸🇬

Singapore is a country in South-Eastern Asia, one of the 11 entries this site files under that subregion. Treaties and official documents call it Republic of Singapore. The capital is Singapore, the same name as the country, which is the usual sign of a city-state.

The population is about 6.0 million, placing it 113th of 249 by population — between Congo above it and Denmark below. Among the 11 entries in South-Eastern Asia it ranks 11th by area and 9th by population.

It covers 710 km², which ranks it 195th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Tonga and just ahead of Micronesia. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is roughly twice the size of Malta.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Singapore ranks 195th of 249 by area and 113th by population. That works out at less than a thousandth of a percent of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.074% 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 Singapore in the size ordering are Tonga at 747 km² and Micronesia at 702 km², against Singapore's 710 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Singapore averages 8,503 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it one of the most densely settled places on the whole list — 3rd 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.

Its reference point sits at 1.4° north and 103.8° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 152 km from the equator, in what geographers would call the equatorial belt.

Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include DR Congo, Kenya and Uganda.

It shares no land border with anyone. That puts it among the 85 entries of 249 here with no land neighbours, so everything and everyone arrives by sea or by air.

Singapore has no land border with any country, which changes what "nearby" means. Measured centre to centre in a straight line, the closest other entry on this site is Malaysia, roughly 980 km away. These are approximate distances between representative points, not the shortest crossing between two shorelines, so treat them as a sense of scale rather than a sailing chart.

Being surrounded by water rather than by neighbours pushes a country's relationships outward. Christmas Island sits in a different world region from Singapore yet ranks among its closest geographic company — the kind of pairing that only shows up once you stop thinking in continents.

No land border also means no land crossing: everything and everyone arrives by sea or by air. That single fact drives a lot of what follows on this page, from how goods reach the shops to why Singapore's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 8,503 people per square kilometre, which makes it among the most densely populated places on earth. The median across all 249 entries here is about 91 per square kilometre.

Someone from Singapore is a Singaporean.

4 languages carry official status: Chinese, English, Malay and Tamil. Chinese, the first listed, is shared with 4 other entries worldwide.

Against Asia as a whole it is the 36th most populous of 50 entries, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in South-Eastern Asia.

Zoom in from the world to South-Eastern Asia and Singapore sits 9th of 11 by population and 11th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Laos just above and Timor-Leste just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇱🇦 Laos
• 🇹🇱 Timor-Leste
• 🇮🇩 Indonesia

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

Language reaches wider still. English is listed for 91 entries here, Singapore 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 Singapore dollar ($, SGD). That currency appears nowhere else on this list.

Its internet country code is .sg. The international dialling code is +65. Standard country codes: sg and SGP.

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.