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Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

It's worth noting that "Great Britain" is very specifically the name of a geographical land mass -- an island off the coast of Europe that currently includes England, Wales, and Scotland.

In political terms it doesn't include NI ... or the Isle of Man, the Isle of Wight, and the Channel Islands.

(Also, in event of Scottish independence, using "GB" for the nationality would cause confusion because post-independence there'd be two separate nations on the GB land mass. See also [minor] confusion over "Ireland".)

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Sorry to be picky, but the Isle of Man and Channels Islands aren't part of the UK either.

Politically, IoW is part of England and so GB, albeit geographically a separate island.

Jesus christ, just when I thought I understood what all the convoluted UK/GB/etc names meant, now I discover I need to add "Crown Dependencies" to the list? That turn out to be neither part of the UK nor British Overseas Territories?

I swear they're just messing with us. Who comes up with these things...

The always relevant CGP Grey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10

Skip to 5:00 for a beautiful diagram outlining the mess.

I assumed this link would have been one of the top comments! All the other links in this thread combined don't shed light on the topic nearly as well as CGP Grey's video.

Probably explains the lack of a constitution too. No one dares to try and document it!

> In political terms it doesn't include NI ...

It often does - for example someone from NI can join the GB Olympics team.

Indeed, but someone from NI can also join the Irish Olympic team. I guess the use of GB rather than UK is a way of addressing that sensitive question by not including NI as default in one team.

Also Football and Rugby. In general the sporting associations have a conditionally Unified Ireland policy, where it's really flexible which countries an athlete can compete for.

Northern Ireland has its own Football team, though I guess anyone who was born in NI has the right to be an RoI citizen they could choose to play for RoI instead. There is only a single Irish Rugby team though.

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