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The term Britain is widely used as a common name for the sovereign state of the United Kingdom, or UK for short. The United Kingdom includes three countries on the largest island, which can be called the island of Britain or Great Britain: these are England, Scotland and Wales.
Great Britain (commonly shortened to Britain) is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean off the north-west coast of continental Europe, consisting of the countries England, Scotland, and Wales. With an area of 209,331 km 2 (80,823 sq mi), it is the largest of the British Isles , the largest European island , and the ninth-largest island in the ...
The Acts of Union 1707 declared that the Kingdom of England and Kingdom of Scotland were "United into One Kingdom by the Name of Great Britain". [p] [22] The term "United Kingdom" has occasionally been used as a description for the former Kingdom of Great Britain, although its official name from 1707 to 1800 was simply "Great Britain". [23]
Viscounts of Ireland have precedence below peers of England, Scotland, and Great Britain of the same rank, and above peers of the United Kingdom of the same rank; but Irish peers created after 1801 yield to United Kingdom peers of earlier creation. A number of Speakers of the House of Commons have been elevated to the peerage as viscounts.
—Pseudo-Aristotle, On the Universe, 393b Pliny the Elder, in the fourth book of his Natural History likewise calls Great Britain Albion. He begins his chapter on the British Isles as follows, after describing the Rhine delta: Ex adverso huius situs Britannia insula clara Graecis nostrisque monimentis inter septentrionem et occidentem iacet, Germaniae, Galliae, Hispaniae, multo maximis ...
The Kingdom of Great Britain came into being on 1 May 1707, as a result of the political union of the Kingdom of England (which included Wales) and the Kingdom of Scotland under the Treaty of Union. This combined the two kingdoms into a single kingdom and merged the two parliaments into a single parliament of Great Britain.
W. F. H. Nicolaisen, Old European names in Britain, Nomina 6 pp37–42 (1982. P. H. Reaney, The Origin of English Place Names (1960). A. Room, A Concise Dictionary of Modern Place Names in Great Britain (1983). A. Room, Dictionary of World Place Names derived from British Names (1989).
This article lists a number of common generic forms in place names in the British Isles, their meanings and some examples of their use.The study of place names is called toponymy; for a more detailed examination of this subject in relation to British and Irish place names, refer to Toponymy in the United Kingdom and Ireland.