What is the largest country by area?
Russia, at about 17.1 million km², is nearly twice the next-largest country and close to the size of South America. Greenland, the shape a world map exaggerates most, is smaller than Algeria. The 24 countries over 1.2 million km² together account for roughly two thirds of all land.
How do the largest countries compare to continents?
Less favourably than the rankings suggest. Russia leads the country table by a wide margin and is still smaller than either of the Americas: a country has to be exceptional to reach the size of an ordinary continent. Of the seven continents, only Antarctica, Europe and Oceania are smaller than Russia — and Europe is smaller than Russia on its own. Switch to the continents set and the top of the country list slots into the middle of it, which is the comparison the two stacks exist to make possible.
Which countries does a world map exaggerate most?
The ones furthest from the equator. Mercator stretches area by roughly the square of the secant of the latitude: negligible at the equator, and without limit approaching the poles. Greenland, Canada and Russia gain the most from it; Brazil, India and the countries across central Africa lose. The Mercator's favourites set stacks the eight shapes a world map inflates hardest and drops each to the size it actually is, which puts Greenland below the United States rather than beside Africa.
Every figure on this page
| Unit | Area (km²) | Share of land | Outline vs figure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Russia | 17,098,246 | 11.4% | +1.0% |
| Canada | 9,984,670 | 6.6% | +0.0% |
| United States of America | 9,833,517 | 6.5% | +3.6% |
| China | 9,596,961 | 6.4% | +2.0% |
| Brazil | 8,515,767 | 5.7% | -0.3% |
| Australia | 7,692,024 | 5.1% | -0.1% |
| India | 3,287,263 | 2.2% | +4.3% |
| Argentina | 2,780,400 | 1.8% | -0.1% |
| Kazakhstan | 2,724,900 | 1.8% | +0.1% |
| Algeria | 2,381,741 | 1.6% | +2.7% |
| Democratic Republic of the Congo | 2,344,858 | 1.6% | +0.5% |
| Greenland | 2,166,086 | 1.4% | -1.1% |
| Saudi Arabia | 2,149,690 | 1.4% | +11.7% |
| Mexico | 1,964,375 | 1.3% | -0.5% |
| Indonesia | 1,904,569 | 1.3% | +4.3% |
| Sudan | 1,861,484 | 1.2% | +0.3% |
| Libya | 1,759,540 | 1.2% | +7.5% |
| Iran | 1,648,195 | 1.1% | +1.8% |
| Mongolia | 1,564,110 | 1.0% | +1.6% |
| Peru | 1,285,216 | 0.9% | -2.3% |
| Chad | 1,284,000 | 0.9% | +0.6% |
| Niger | 1,267,000 | 0.8% | +6.8% |
| Angola | 1,246,700 | 0.8% | -0.3% |
| Mali | 1,240,192 | 0.8% | +0.1% |
Why do world maps show the wrong sizes?
Mercator-style world maps distort area badly, which is why Greenland is usually drawn about the size of Africa when it is closer to one fourteenth of it. Every outline on this page is projected with Lambert Azimuthal Equal-Area, centred on its own centroid, and every layer shares one kilometre-to-screen scale. Area on screen is therefore proportional to real area: what looks bigger is bigger. Each outline is scaled by a small fit factor so its drawn area matches the published figure, and that geometry is checked against those figures automatically.
Why does the outline disagree with the figure?
The last column is the gap between the two numbers behind every slab. The outline comes from Natural Earth's 110m coastline; the area is the published figure that outline is drawn to. They rarely match, so each shape is scaled by a small factor until its drawn area equals the published one — and that factor is what the column reports.
Most of the gap is coarseness: a 110m coastline cuts corners, and cutting corners loses area. That accounts for the small positive numbers, and it is why almost everything here needs nudging up. Seven shapes go the other way and are drawn slightly too large, which the same correction shrinks. Two cases are not coarseness at all. Antarctica's 16% is a definition: the coastline encloses the grounded ice sheet, about 12.2 million km², while the published 14.2 million counts the floating Ross and Ronne-Filchner shelves, which no coastline encloses. India's 4.3% is Kashmir — Natural Earth assigns Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir to Pakistan, and the published Indian figure includes them.
For the rest, the honest answer is that this page does not know. Saudi Arabia's 11.7% is the largest gap among the countries and no specific cause is claimed for it here. The column is published rather than hidden because a correction applied silently is the kind of thing that stops being questioned.
How to use it
Drag to orbit the stack. Scroll or pinch in to peel down through it one layer at a time, digging from the smallest continent to the largest. Click any name, in the legend or on a label, to hide that layer. The comparison panel re-expresses every area as a multiple of whichever layer you have surfaced. Nothing to install, and it works offline.
Outlines from Natural Earth 110m. Areas cross-checked against published figures. Contested boundaries (Siberia, Sinai, Thrace, Kazakhstan) are stated rather than hidden, with the cost of each decision documented. The projection is Lambert Azimuthal Equal-Area, computed per landmass about its own centroid.