[tialaramex]

Very few people on HN will have been alive when there was a county of London. It ceased to exist in the 1960s.

The UK does not require this layer of subdivision to exist, so it's not that there's a different county or set of counties covering the same area now but rather there is no county. This is a contrast to say the US system where AIUI there must be a county and in some cases that county doesn't really matter (e.g. New York County in New York City aka Manhattan) but it has to exist anyway.

City status is very different here, the Monarch (ie now Charlie) gets to decide what is or is not a city, but because that's arbitrary it also has very few consequences, it's a cosmetic basically, you can write "City" on some signs if you like, but if you feel like a small town you still feel like a small town, and if you already feel like a bustling city then having the word doesn't make a real difference.

[mavhc]

UK is a country made up of 4 countries, I guess we really like to annoy anyone trying to define a hierarchy

[wongarsu]

And the US the a sovereign state made up of 50 states. They used to be called that because they were independent countries

There are other offenders, but the US and UK together are probably the main reason English no longer has concise but unambiguous way to refer to sovereign states

[IAmBroom]

> They used to be called that because they were independent countries

The latter part is true of exactly one US state (Hawaii), but otherwise false. They are called that because they are political bodies capable of international relations. The 13 founding states were British colonies; Florida, New Mexico and Texas were famously Mexican and/or Spanish colonies, and the western half of the continental states were French colonies (though largely unexplored by France, so only nominally held).

[evanelias]

I believe GP is technically correct in several ways. The first 13 states were mostly independent and sovereign under the Articles of Confederation from 1781 until 1789, when the US Constitution superseded it and established a much more significant central government.

Texas was an independent republic from 1836 until US annexation at the end of 1845. Although Mexico did not recognize the independence of the Republic of Texas, numerous other countries did.

California is more of an edge-case. It was arguably an independent republic for a few weeks in 1846. And a similar story with Florida: the Republic of West Florida existed for a couple months in 1810. But both of these cases were basically small uprisings that weren't broadly recognized by other countries.

[tialaramex]

"And by 'country' we mean a sovereign state that is a member of the UN in its own right"

[qingcharles]

Except where the USA has parishes instead of counties, just to mix it up some more.