   #copyright

Great Britain

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: British History; Politics
and government

   Great Britain lies between Ireland and mainland Europe
   Enlarge
   Great Britain lies between Ireland and mainland Europe

   Great Britain is an island lying off the northwestern coast of mainland
   Europe and to the east of Ireland, comprising the main territory of the
   United Kingdom. Great Britain is also used as a geopolitical term
   describing the combination of England, Scotland, and Wales, which
   together comprise the entire island and some outlying islands. In
   everyday speech and non-official writing in all English-speaking and
   most other countries, "Great Britain", and simply "Britain", are much
   more commonly used than "United Kingdom" to designate the sovereign
   state officially known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
   Northern Ireland (see United Kingdom). In addition, "Great Britain"
   and/or the abbreviation "GB" (or "GBR") are officially used for the
   entire country by the Universal Postal Union, the International Olympic
   Committee, NATO, the International Organization for Standardization,
   and other organisations. (See also country codes and international
   licence plate codes).

   The adjective British has come to refer to things associated with the
   United Kingdom generally such as citizenship, and not just the island
   of Great Britain.

Geographical definition

   With an area of 80,800 square miles (209,000  km²) the island of Great
   Britain is the largest of the British Isles. It is the largest island
   in Europe, and eighth largest in the world. It is the third most
   populous island after Java and Honshū.

   Great Britain stretches over approximately ten degrees of latitude on
   its longer, north-south axis. Geographically, the island is marked by
   low, rolling countryside in the east and south, while hills and
   mountains predominate in the western and northern regions. Before the
   end of the last ice age, Great Britain was a peninsula of Europe; the
   rising sea levels caused by glacial melting at the end of the ice age
   caused the formation of the English Channel, the body of water which
   now separates Great Britain from continental Europe at a minimum
   distance of 21 miles (34 km).

   The climate of Great Britain is milder than that of other regions of
   the Northern Hemisphere at the same latitude, because the warm waters
   of the Gulf Stream pass by the British Isles and exert a moderating
   influence on the weather. Cool, but not cold, temperatures, clouds more
   often than sun, and abundant rain are the rule in most years.

Political definition

   Politically, Great Britain describes the combination of England,
   Scotland, and Wales. It includes outlying islands such as the Isle of
   Wight, Anglesey, the Isles of Scilly, the Hebrides, and the island
   groups of Orkney and Shetland but does not include the Isle of Man or
   the Channel Islands.

   Over the centuries, Great Britain has evolved politically from several
   independent countries (England, Scotland, and Wales) through two
   kingdoms with a shared monarch (England and Scotland), a single
   all-island Kingdom of Great Britain, to the situation following 1801,
   in which Great Britain together with the island of Ireland constituted
   the larger United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (UK). The UK
   became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in the
   1920s ( 1922) following the independence of five-sixths of Ireland as
   first the Irish Free State, a Dominion of the then British
   Commonwealth, and then later as an independent republic outside the
   British Commonwealth as the Republic of Ireland.

History

   As recently as 9,000 years ago, Great Britain was not an island at all.
   The end of the last ice age saw the southeastern part of Great Britain
   still connected by a strip of low marshes to the European mainland in
   what is now northeastern France. In Cheddar Gorge near Bristol, the
   remains of animals native to mainland Europe such as antelopes, Brown
   Bears, and Wild Horses have been found alongside a human skeleton,
   Cheddar Man, dated to about 7150 B.C. Thus, animals and humans must
   have moved between mainland Europe and Great Britain via a crossing.

   Albion (Alouion in Ptolemy) is the most ancient name of Great Britain.
   It sometimes is used to refer to England specifically. Occasionally, it
   refers to Scotland, or Alba in Gaelic, Albain in Irish, and Yr Alban in
   Welsh[1]. Pliny the Elder in his Natural History (iv.xvi.102) applies
   it unequivocally to Great Britain. The origin of the name Britain may
   be connected with the Brythonic 'Prydyn' (Goidelic: Cruithne), a name
   used to describe some northern inhabitants of the island by Britons or
   pre-Roman Celts in the south. "It was itself named Albion, while all
   the islands about which we shall soon briefly speak were called the
   Britanniae." The name Albion was taken by medieval writers from Pliny
   and Ptolemy. For etymology, see below.
   Flag of the historical Kingdom of Great Britain (1707-1800)
   Enlarge
   Flag of the historical Kingdom of Great Britain (1707-1800)

   The term was used officially for the first time during the reign of
   King James VI of Scotland, I of England. Though England and Scotland
   each remained legally in existence as separate countries with their own
   parliaments, on 20 October 1604 King James proclaimed himself as 'King
   of Great Brittaine, France and Ireland', a title that continued to be
   used by many of his successors. In 1707, an Act of Union joined both
   parliaments. That Act used two different terms to describe the new all
   island nation, a 'United Kingdom' and the 'Kingdom of Great Britain'.
   However, the former term is regarded by many as having been a
   description of the union rather than its name at that stage. Most
   reference books therefore describe the all-island kingdom that existed
   between 1707 and 1800 as the Kingdom of Great Britain."

   In 1801, under a new Act of Union, this kingdom merged with the Kingdom
   of Ireland, over which the monarch of Great Britain had ruled. The new
   kingdom was from then onwards unambiguously called the United Kingdom
   of Great Britain and Ireland. In 1922, 26 of Ireland's 32 counties were
   given independence to form a separate Irish Free State. The remaining
   truncated kingdom has therefore since then been known as the United
   Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Usage and nomenclature

Usage of the term Great Britain

   Great Britain is an informal name for the political state properly
   known as the United Kingdom.

   This common usage is technically inaccurate as the United Kingdom
   includes Northern Ireland, in addition to the three countries that make
   up Great Britain, as shown by its full name “the United Kingdom of
   Great Britain and Northern Ireland”, and also because the three
   countries that make up Great Britain itself collectively include over
   100 other islands.

   The United Kingdom has been assigned the international foreign vehicle
   identification code of GB, and the ISO 3166 geocodes GB and GBR, as
   abbreviations for “the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern
   Ireland”. The same abbreviation, 'GB', is used informally, for example,
   in the Olympic Games, where the United Kingdom team may refer to
   themselves as 'Team GB'. The UK abbreviation, as used in Internet
   domain names, can be confused with Ukraine.

   There is a similar situation with the terms Britain and British, which
   are used to relate to the whole of the United Kingdom and not just the
   islands of Great Britain. This usage is generally considered to be
   correct. Examples of this are "British monarchs", "British culture" and
   "British citizens" - which would generally be considered to embrace the
   whole of the United Kingdom. As if this was not confusion enough, the
   term "British" also has specific historical and archaeological usage,
   referring to the Celtic Brython peoples on the island prior to and
   during the Roman occupation.

   The designation 'British Isles', usually refers to Great Britain,
   Ireland, the Isle of Man and all other islands as listed above. The
   Channel Islands are often not included in this designation, as they are
   located approximately 12 miles off the coast of northwestern France and
   are geologically related to mainland France.

   In rugby league the RFL fields its representative side under the name
   Great Britain.

Nomenclature

   The name Britain is derived from the name Britannia, used by the Romans
   from circa 55 BC and increasingly used to describe the island which had
   formerly been known as insula Albionum, the "island of the Albions".
   The name Britannia derived from the travel writings of the ancient
   Greek Pytheas around 320 BC, which described the British isles,
   including Ireland, as the αι Βρεττανιαι, the Brittanic Isles. The
   peoples of these islands of Prettanike were called the Ρρεττανοι,
   Priteni or Pretani. These names derived from a " Celtic language" term
   which is likely to have reached Pytheas from the Gauls, who may have
   used it as their term for the inhabitants of the islands. Priteni is
   the source of the Welsh language term Prydain, Britain, which has the
   same source as the Goidelic term Cruithne used to refer to the early
   Brythonic speaking inhabitants of Ireland and the north of Scotland.
   The latter were called Picts or Caledonians by the Romans. (See British
   Isles (terminology) for further discussion of etymology).

   Great Britain may well be a translation of the French term Grande
   Bretagne, which is used in France to distinguish Britain from Brittany
   (in French: Bretagne), which had been settled in late Roman times by
   Romano-Celtic troops from Maximus' army and later by refugees from
   Roman Britain, who were then under attack by the Anglo-Saxons. Since
   the English court and aristocracy was largely French-speaking for about
   two centuries after the Norman Conquest of 1066, the French term
   naturally passed into English usage. The Normans being descendants of
   Vikings who had occupied the area of Normandy for some time demanding
   land and tithes from Gaul in exchange for peace and no more invasions.

Where is 'Minor' Britain?

   In Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (circa 1136), the
   island of Great Britain was referred to as Britannia major ("Greater
   Britain"), to distinguish it from Britannia minor ("Lesser Britain"),
   the continental region which approximates to modern Brittany. The term
   "Bretayne the grete" was used by chroniclers as early as 1338, but it
   was not used officially until James I proclaimed himself "King of Great
   Britain" on 20 October 1604 to avoid the more cumbersome title "King of
   England and Scotland".

   In Irish, Wales is referred to as An Bhreatain Bheag which means
   'Little Britain' although the closely related Scottish Gaelic uses this
   term - "A'Bhreatainn Bheag" - to refer to Brittany.

   Little Britain is also the name of a BBC radio and television sketch
   show, and the name of a street in the City of London.

Other lands of the archipelago

     * Ireland
          + Republic of Ireland
          + Northern Ireland
     * Isle of Man
     * Channel Islands

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Britain"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
