World's Largest Countries by Area

Russia is the largest country in the world, and it is not close. At roughly 17.1 million square kilometres it covers about 11 percent of all land on Earth, spans 11 time zones, and is nearly twice the size of Canada, the runner-up. The more interesting question is what happens just below it, because third place genuinely depends on who is doing the counting.

The United States and China are the ranking's famous dispute. Counting total area including coastal and territorial waters, as the CIA World Factbook does, the United States comes third. Counting land alone, China is ahead and the United States drops to fourth. Both answers are correct under their own rules, which is why different atlases disagree and why quiz writers should accept either.

Notice the cliff after Australia. The top six are all giants of 7.7 million square kilometres or more, then India arrives at less than half the size of Australia. Together, the ten countries above hold roughly half of all the land on the planet.

Kazakhstan deserves a special mention: at ninth place it is the largest landlocked country in the world, more than ten times the size of every other landlocked state except Mongolia, Chad, Niger and Mali. And Algeria closing out the top ten is a recent development, inherited when Sudan lost a quarter of its territory at the 2011 split.