Every dot is a country, coloured by continent; the one you have selected is ringed. Hover a dot for its figures, click it to select it, or click a continent in the key to pull it out of the crowd. These are the six shapes a table of this data hides.
Solar time is geometry: the sun is overhead at longitude ÷ 15 hours from UTC, exactly. Legal time is a choice, and the two come apart by more than an hour in sixteen countries.
Choose both countries, then click the statistic you think the left-hand card wins on. Deal a random pair instead and the right-hand card stays face down until you commit to a stat.
The default: every country occupies its true share of the page, so comparing sizes by eye works. It buys that by shearing shapes, most visibly at the poles.
Preserves angles, so a constant compass bearing is a straight line, and it has never been replaced for navigation. The price is area: scale 1/cos(latitude).
Four rings run up to the antimeridian and continue on the far side. Each is cut wherever consecutive points jump more than 180° of longitude.
Figures are the latest World Bank value per country, each with its year. Nothing is estimated to fill a gap: no figure shows a dash.
Mercator exaggerates area by 1/cos²(latitude): four times at 60° and fifteen at 75°. Equal Earth draws every country at its true share of the page, the only view where comparing shapes by eye means anything.
The World Bank reports Greenland at 410,450 km², its ice-free land, not its 2.17 million km² total, so it sits far lower in a sort than you expect: the source being precise, not the table being broken. The Bank’s separate “surface area” series is not used: it includes marine area and puts Bermuda at 4,290 km² against a real 54. A column that wrong does not belong in a sortable ranking.
Where a country has no reported value the cell shows a dash. Nothing is interpolated, averaged from neighbours or carried forward from an older year, so a sparse column is telling you something real about what gets measured.
Each figure is the most recent the World Bank holds for that country, and those years differ: a 2019 population sits beside a 2024 one. Totals are therefore approximate by construction, which is why the group cards give shares rather than headline sums.
Current US dollars at market rates: a currency swing changes a country’s GDP here without anything happening in its economy, and it moves the rankings. Purchasing power parity answers a different question and is not on this page.
Natural Earth at 1:110m is 177 shapes. Singapore, Malta, Monaco, Bahrain and around two dozen more are real countries with real data that cannot be drawn at that scale. Zoom in past a third of the world and the map switches to 1:50m (241 shapes, a separate 430 KB file fetched only when needed, simplified per shared border so neighbours still meet). Monaco, the Vatican and San Marino are below even that; they are in the browser and the rankings.
On a phone the map opens on your part of the world, from one thing the browser already knows: its own UTC offset, which fixes a longitude to within about an hour of arc. No location prompt, no IP lookup, no request of any kind. Longitude cannot tell Europe from Africa, so the latitude comes from the time zone’s continent, weighted by where people in that band live. The ⤢ button always returns the whole world.
A projection can preserve area, or angles, or distance from one point, never all three, and area and angle never together. That is a theorem, not a limitation of cartography: Gauss proved in 1827 that a sphere has intrinsic curvature and a plane does not, so no mapping preserves both shape and size. The honest question is which distortion you can live with for the job in front of you.
Equal Earth (Šavrič, Patterson and Jenny, 2018) is the modern answer to the argument Gall–Peters made loudly in the 1970s, that Mercator shrinks the tropics, without Gall–Peters’ badly stretched continents. One correction: the United Nations emblem is often cited as the “true size” map, but it is not equal-area. It is an azimuthal equidistant projection centred on the North Pole, preserving distance from the centre and distorting area severely toward the edges: Antarctica becomes the entire rim.
At 60° everything is drawn twice its true size, at 75° nearly four times (linear). Greenland is about the size of Algeria and Mercator draws it larger than Africa. It is also the taller map: clipped at 80°, it still needs half again the height of Equal Earth to fit the same world.
Natural Earth stores Russia, Fiji and Antarctica as rings that run up to the antimeridian and continue on the far side at the opposite longitude. Drawn in order, the pen jumps from +180° to −180° straight across the map: four rings do it, and the streaks look exactly like a rendering bug because that is what they are. Every ring is cut wherever consecutive points jump more than 180° and each piece is closed on its own; a piece whose ends land on opposite edges (Antarctica, which genuinely wraps the globe) is closed through the pole, which is why the ice fills the bottom of the map.
Population, land and surface area, GDP, GDP per capita, life expectancy, urban share, CO₂ per head and forest cover come from the World Bank Open Data API, each at its most recent year available; the wider comparison set (GDP at PPP, growth, inflation, unemployment, births per woman, the share aged 65 and over, under-five mortality, internet use, electricity access, renewable energy, health and military spending, arable land) is the same API at each series’ most recent non-empty year. Highest and lowest points, ISO codes and continents come from Wikidata. Boundaries are Natural Earth at 1:110m, and 1:50m once you zoom in.
Eight drawn landmasses have none: Western Sahara, the Falklands, the French Southern Territories, Taiwan, Antarctica, Northern Cyprus, Somaliland and Kosovo. Each is contested, uninhabited, or both. They are drawn, greyed and named rather than deleted.
Neither, and the question has no answer. Equal Earth is correct for comparing sizes; Mercator is correct for holding a bearing. A map that claimed to be correct for both would be making a mathematically impossible claim.
Because it is dated. Each figure carries the year the World Bank last reported it for that country, and those years differ — a 2019 figure for one country sits next to a 2024 figure for another. The year is shown next to the number for exactly that reason.
Only roughly. These are current US dollars at market exchange rates, so a currency movement changes a country’s GDP without anything happening in its economy. Purchasing power parity tells a different and often more useful story, and is not shown here.
Releases in which this page changed, newest last. Derived from the archived copy of every release, not from notes written afterwards — so it reflects what actually shipped. Site-wide passes are left out; they are in the full changelog.