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A canton is a type of administrative division of a country. In general, cantons are relatively small in terms of area and population when compared to other administrative divisions such as counties, departments or provinces. Internationally the best-known cantons, and the most politically important, are those of Switzerland. As the constituents of the Swiss Confederation, theoretically (and historically) the Swiss cantons are sovereign states.

The term is derived from the French word canton meaning corner or district (from which "Cantonment" is also derived).^[1]

Cantons in specific countries[link]

Cantons exist (or existed) in the following countries:

• Cantons of Belgium
• Cantons of Bolivia
• Cantons of Bosnia and Herzegovina: a subdivision of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina
• Canada: Canadian French equivalent for the English word "township", since the translation municipalité is already used for a different level of government (see township).
  • Cantons of Quebec
• Cantons of Costa Rica: subdivisions below the provinces of Costa Rica
• Cantons of Ecuador: subdivisions below the provinces of Ecuador
• Cantons of El Salvador: divisions of a municipality outside the more urban caserios, which border the town or city. Cantones can be thought as the more rural parts of a city or town, generally far from the actual urban population.
• Cantons of France: a subdivision of arrondissements and départements, grouping several communes
• Cantons of Lebanon, unofficial areas controlled by the various militias and factions during the Lebanese Civil War and afterwards. Most areas have been returned to Lebanese government control.
• Cantons of Luxembourg: a subdivision of the districts of Luxembourg
• Cantons of Switzerland: each a semi-sovereign state within Switzerland
• subdivisions of vingtaines in Jersey
• Juridical district in the Netherlands^{[citation needed]}

Cantons in former countries[link]

• Cantons of the Ottoman Empire, also called kaza a subdivision of a sanjak
• Cantons of the Soviet Union, subdivisions of several autonomous regions of the Soviet Union before 1941
• In 1873, "Cantonalists" took over the city of Cartagena, Spain, a haven for the Spanish Navy, and declared the city independent (see Cantonal Revolution)

References[link]

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Canton may refer to:

Administrative divisions[link]

• Canton (country subdivision), territorial/administrative subdivision in some countries, notably Switzerland
• Township (Canada), known as canton in Canadian French

Place names[link]

Australia[link]

• Canton Beach, New South Wales, Australia

China[link]

• Canton Province, or Guangdong Province, a province in southern China
• Guangzhou, known historically as Canton, the capital city of the Guangdong Province
  • Canton Tower （广州塔）, in the above
  • Canton Fair （广州交易会）, in the above
  • Canton System, to control trade with the west (1757-1842)

Kiribati[link]

• Canton Island, Kiribati

United States[link]

• Canton, California
• Canton, Connecticut
• Canton, Georgia
• Canton, Illinois
• Canton, Iowa
• Canton, Kansas
• Canton, Maine
• Canton, Baltimore, Maryland, a neighborhood and park
• Canton, Massachusetts
• Canton, Michigan
• Canton, Minnesota
• Canton, Mississippi
• Canton, Missouri
• Canton, Montana, a former town now situated under Canyon Ferry Lake
• Canton (town), New York
• Canton (village), New York
• Canton, North Carolina
• Canton City, North Dakota
• Canton, Ohio, the most populous metro region in this list
• Canton, Oklahoma
• Canton, Pennsylvania
• Canton, South Dakota
• Canton, Texas
• Canton, Wisconsin, a town
• Canton, Barron County, Wisconsin, an unincorporated community
• Canton Township (disambiguation)

Wales[link]

• Canton, Cardiff, Wales

Fictional[link]

• Canton, a fictional town in "Jaynestown", an episode of Firefly

People[link]

• Canton (surname), and list of people with the surname
• Canton Jones, American Christian music/hip-hop artist

Other[link]

• Canton (building), a corner pilaster
• Canton (flag), any quarter of a flag
• Canton (heraldry), a charge placed in the upper dexter corner
• Canton (liqueur), a ginger-flavored liqueur
• Canton Synagogue, a historical synagogue in the Venetian Ghetto

See also[link]

• Cantone, a Swiss village
• Cantonese
• Cantonment, a temporary or semi-permanent military quarters
• Cantonist
• Kanton (disambiguation)
• East Cantons
• Eric Cantona
• East Canton, Ohio
• New Canton, Illinois
• North Canton, Ohio
• West Canton, North Carolina

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

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For "administrative division" in the sense of a company department, see: Division (business).

World administrative divisions

An administrative division, subnational entity, or country subdivision is a portion of a country or other political division, established for the purpose of government. Administrative divisions are each granted a certain degree of autonomy, and are required to manage themselves through their own local governments. Countries are divided up into these smaller units to make managing their land and the affairs of their people easier. For example, a country may be divided into provinces, which in turn are divided into counties, which in turn may be divided in whole or in part into municipalities. These are only a few of the names given to administrative subdivisions; more examples are provided below.

Administrative divisions are conceptually separate from dependent territories, with the former being an integral part of the state and the other being only under some lesser form of control. However, the term "administrative division" can include dependent territories as well as accepted administrative divisions (for example, in geographical databases).

Examples of administrative divisions[link]

English terms[link]

In many of the following terms corresponding to British cultural influence, areas of relatively low mean population density might bear a title of an entity one would expect to be either larger or smaller. There is no fixed rule, for "all politics is local" as is perhaps well demonstrated by their relative lack of systemic order. In the realm of self-government, any of these can and does occur along a stretch of road—which for the most part is passing through rural unsettled countryside. Since the terms are administrative political subdivisions of the local regional government their exact relationship and definitions are subject to home rule considerations, tradition, as well as state statute law and local governmental (administrative) definition and control. In the British cultural legacy, most regional entities begin with fairly expansive counties which encompass an appreciable territorial area and proceed down in size to smaller entities.

Within those entities are the large and small cities or towns, which may or may not be the county seat. Some of the world's larger cities culturally, if not officially, span into multiple counties and those crossing state or provincial boundaries culturally are quite common as well, but are rarely incorporated within the same municipal government. Many sister cities share a water boundary which quite often serves as a border of both cities and counties. For example, Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts appear to the casual traveler as one large city, while locally they each are quite culturally different and occupy different counties.

• Area
• Autonomous communities, as in the Autonomous communities of Spain
• Commune
• County
• Country - the United Kingdom is subdivided into 'constituent countries' e.g. Scotland
• Constituency - usually refers to an electoral division (which is not an administrative division), but in Namibia and in Canton of St. Gallen in Switzerland, "constituency" means "administrative division".
• Department
• Despotate (not subnational)
• District
• Division
• Duchy (partial subnational)
• Empire (not subnational)
• Härad, Herred, Hundred, Kihlakunta
• Kingdom
• Local council
• Municipality
  • Rural
  • Regional
  • Regional county
• Okrug
• Parish
• Prefecture
• Principality (partial subnational)
• Province
• Public body (the general denomination for administrative divisions in the Netherlands)
• Region
• Republic (partial subnational)
• Riding
• State
• Special administrative region
• Territory
• Voivodship

Urban or rural regions:

• Borough or alternatively, "boro"
• Burgh
• City
• Shire
• Town
• Township
• Village

Indigenous:

• Tribe
• Indian reservation
• Indian reserve
• Band

Native terms[link]

See: List of terms for administrative divisions

Consistent translation from original language is sometimes difficult.

Compare[link]

• Sovereign state, a national or supra-national division.
• Country, a national or supra-national division.
• Empire, a supra-national division.

See also[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Subnational entities

• Political division
• Administrative division codes of the People's Republic of China
• ISO 3166-2 Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions — Part 2
• List of terms for administrative divisions
• List of etymologies of country subdivision names
• List of country subdivisions by population
• List of the largest country subdivisions by area
• Table of administrative country subdivisions by country
• List of administrative division name changes
• List of current constituent monarchs
• GADM, a high-resolution database of country administrative areas

External links[link]

• United Nations' Second Administrative Level Boundaries (SALB) dataset
• "Statoids" - an international convention with standard two-letter, multi-level summaries (e.g. GH.AH.AE represents Adansi East in the Accra Home region in Ghana)

European topographical map

Same map as above, but showing sovereign states widely accepted by the UN instead of topographies

A country is a region legally identified as a distinct entity in political geography. A country may be an independent sovereign state or one that is occupied by another state, as a non-sovereign or formerly sovereign political division, or a geographic region associated with sets of previously independent or differently associated peoples with distinct political characteristics. Regardless of the physical geography, in the modern internationally accepted legal definition as defined by the League of Nations in 1937 and reaffirmed by the United Nations in 1945, a resident of a country is subject to the independent exercise of legal jurisdiction.

Sometimes the word country is used to refer both to sovereign states and to other political entities,^[1][2][3] while other times it refers only to states.^[4] For example, the CIA World Factbook uses the word in its "Country name" field to refer to "a wide variety of dependencies, areas of special sovereignty, uninhabited islands, and other entities in addition to the traditional countries or independent states".^[5]

Etymology and usage[link]

The word country has developed from the Late Latin contra meaning "against", used in the sense of "that which lies against, or opposite to, the view", i.e. the landscape spread out to the view. From this came the Late Latin term contrata, which became the modern Italian contrada. The term appears in the Vulgate version of Matthew 12:30 "Qui non est mecum, contra me est: et qui non congregat mihi, spargit. (He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters.) In many ways this defined the agonistic world view of the early Christian identity in Europe.^[6] From this new theological World view several different senses of the term developed in Middle English from the 13th century, all reflecting a sense of either opposition, or occupation.^[7]

In English the word has increasingly become associated with political divisions, so that one sense, associated with the indefinite article – "a country" – is now a synonym for state, or a former sovereign state, in the sense of sovereign territory or "district, native land".^[8] Areas much smaller than a political state may be called by names such as the West Country in England, the Black Country (a heavily industrialized part of England), "Constable Country" (a part of East Anglia painted by John Constable), the "big country" (used in various contexts of the American West), "coal country" (used of parts of the US and elsewhere) and many other terms.^[9]

The equivalent terms in French and Romance languages (pays and variants) have not carried the process of being identified with political sovereign states as far as the English "country", instead derived from, pagus, which designated the territory controlled by a medieval count, a title originally granted by the Roman Church. In many European countries the words are used for sub-divisions of the national territory, as in the German Länder, as well as a less formal term for a sovereign state. France has very many "pays" that are officially recognised at some level, and are either natural regions, like the Pays de Bray, or reflect old political or economic unities, like the Pays de la Loire. At the same time Wales, the United States, and Brazil are also "pays" in everyday French speech.

A version of "country" can be found in the modern French language as contrée, based on the word cuntrée in Old French,^[9] that is used similarly to the word "pays" to define regions and unities, but can also be used to describe a political state in some particular cases. The modern Italian contrada is a word with its meaning varying locally, but usually meaning a ward or similar small division of a town, or a village or hamlet in the countryside.

Nations[link]

Although not sovereign states, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (in the United Kingdom) are examples of entities that are regarded and referred to as countries.^{[10][11][12][13]} Former states such as Bavaria (now part of Germany) and Piedmont (now part of Italy) would not normally be referred to as "countries" in contemporary English.^{[citation needed]}

The degree of autonomy of non-sovereign countries varies widely. Some are possessions of sovereign states, as several states have overseas dependencies (such as the British Virgin Islands (GBR) and Saint Pierre and Miquelon (FRA)), with citizenry at times identical and at times distinct from their own. Such dependent territories are sometimes listed together with sovereign states on lists of countries, and may be treated as a "country of origin" in international trade, as Hong Kong is.

Countries of the world[link]

The term "country" is commonly used to refer to sovereign states. There is no universal agreement on the number of "countries" in the world, seeing as a number of states have disputed sovereignty status. There are 206 total states, with 193 states participating in the United Nations and 15 states whose sovereignty status is disputed. The newest state is South Sudan.^[14]

See also[link]

• List of sovereign states
• Constituent country

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Defining what makes a country The Economist

External links[link]

Look up country in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Canada Foreign Affairs Travel Advisories
• The CIA World Factbook
• Country Portals from the United States Department of State, including Background Notes
• Country Profiles from BBC News
• Country Studies from the United States Library of Congress
• Foreign Information by Country and Country & Territory Guides from GovPubs at UCB Libraries
• PopulationData.net
• United Nations statistics division

Look up subdivide, subdivided, subdivision, or subdivisions in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Subdivision may refer to:

• Administrative subdivision, a portion of a country or other political division, established for the purpose of government
  • Subdivision (land), a term for an urban or suburban area, especially if recently parceled up into smaller plots for new uses
  • Census geographic units of Canada (Census subdivision), a term used in Canada
• Subdivision (meter), a term for division of the beat in music
• Subdivision (botany), a taxonomic rank below a phylum and equivalent to a subphylum
• Subdivision (rank), a taxonomic rank
• Subdivision (film), starring Gary Sweet
• Subdivision (graph theory), mathematics
• "Subdivision" (Prison Break episode), the twenty-eighth episode of American television series Prison Break
• "Subdivisions" (song), by the rock group Rush
• Subdivisions (EP), an EP consisting of re-interpretations of songs from Clearing the Channel (2005)
• Subdivision surface, a term in computer graphics
• Trackage, specifically a named section (North American usage)

See also[link]

• Division (disambiguation)
• All pages with titles containing "Subdivision"
• All pages beginning with "Subdivision"

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.