Countries That Start With X

Sovereign countries (0)

Zero countries — sovereign or otherwise — start with X. The letter X is rare in English, and rarer still as a country-name initial. No sovereign UN member state, observer state, or commonly-recognized territory has an English name beginning with X.

The closest associations are historical or sub-national: Xinjiang (a Chinese autonomous region) and Xizang (the Chinese name for Tibet, also a region of China). Neither is a sovereign country.

Territories and other entities (0)

No current territories or dependencies start with the letter X.

Related letter lookups

X is one of two empty letters on the world map — W is the other. Try the neighbouring letters:

• Countries That Start With W — Also empty. Zero sovereign countries begin with W in English.
• Countries That Start With Y — One nation: Yemen.
• Countries That Start With Z — Two nations — Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Quick answer for skimmers

Q: How many countries start with X?
A: Zero. No sovereign country, observer state, or commonly-recognized territory has an English name beginning with X.

Q: What about Xinjiang or Tibet?
A: Both are autonomous regions of the People’s Republic of China, not independent countries. Tibet has a complex status in international relations — the Tibetan government-in-exile is based in Dharamshala, India — but Tibet is not a UN member state.

Q: Why no X countries?
A: X is uncommon in English orthography generally; very few language-to-English transliterations of country names produce an initial X. The letter X and the letter W are the only two letters of the English alphabet that no sovereign country begins with.