We determine which team you play for, which passport you hold, and which of those is currently true. Select a boundary. Watch which land rises.
Inset, lower right
Gibraltar · 1,700 km south
Not to scale
Choose a definition. The land inside it rises.
Silhouettes are schematic. Outlying islands, Shetland among them, are omitted.
Fifteen competing definitions of who or what belongs where, projected onto the same nine territories. They are not the same species of thing: some are geography, some are membership of an organisation, one is a legal status held by a person. Pick a row to put it on the map.
Boundaries govern territory. Eligibility rules govern people. Choose a place of connection and the context in which the question was put. Every formal ruling below is one you can look up, though sporting answers assume the person otherwise satisfies the relevant citizenship, ancestry, residence, prior-representation and selection rules. Birth alone has not been sufficient for British citizenship since 1983, or for Irish citizenship since 2005.
| Term | Covers | Notably excludes |
|---|---|---|
| British Isles | Great Britain, Ireland, the Isle of Man, and by convention the Channel Islands | Any suggestion that Ireland is British, which is the objection the term reliably produces |
| Great Britain | England, Scotland, Wales | Northern Ireland |
| United Kingdom | Great Britain and Northern Ireland | The Isle of Man, Jersey, Guernsey |
| Team GB | The whole United Kingdom, the Crown Dependencies, and eligible Overseas Territories | Accuracy in its own name |
| Crown Dependencies | The Isle of Man, Jersey, Guernsey. Own parliaments, own laws | Membership of the United Kingdom, and independence from it |
| British Overseas Territories | Fourteen territories. Most of their citizens are also British citizens: existing BOTCs connected with qualifying territories acquired it automatically in 2002, the Sovereign Base Areas were excluded, and some statuses acquired since require separate registration | Britain |
| Ireland | An island. Also a sovereign state | Six counties, in exactly one of those two senses |
| Home Nations | England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland | Two of them, in cricket. One of them, in rugby |
| British and Irish Lions | Four unions across two sovereign states | The distinction those two states were founded on |
Recorded here so they are not reported twice. No attempt should be made to reconcile them.
Charts are amended by notice rather than reprint. So is the constitution. Both keep the errors of every previous edition.
England, already merged with Wales, unions with Scotland on 1 May 1707. New name: Great Britain. Wales is not in the name, and is not mentioned in it again.
Union with Ireland. New name: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. All existing references to Great Britain remain in service and are now imprecise.
The Irish Free State is established on 6 December. Northern Ireland exercises its treaty right to opt out the following day. The resulting state contains twenty-six counties. The United Kingdom's name is not corrected until 1927, when Northern Ireland is appended. The abbreviation is never corrected at all.
Belfast Agreement. It does not invent anything: it recognises and guarantees the existing birthright of the people of Northern Ireland to be accepted as British or Irish, or both, and to hold both citizenships. The Authority regards this as the only part of the chart that works as drawn.
Withdrawal from the European Union. Team Europe is unaffected, because Ryder Cup eligibility never ran on European Union membership. Britain remains Europe in golf for reasons that predate the European Union and outlasted it.