Shopping on line can be easy, simple and save you lots of money. It can also take a lot of your time, frustrate you, and result in unwanted purchases. Now the same can be said for regular high street shopping, but with the vast opportunity presented by the Internet it will pay you to spend a few minutes reading this and understanding how to better optimize your Great Britain shopping experience:

1. Compare - without doubt the biggest advantage that the Great Britain offers shoppers today is the ability to compare thousands of Great Britain at a time. This is a great thing, but not necessarily all the time! Too much can be daunting at times so take advantage of the great comparison sites and where possible let them do the hard work for you.

2. Research - if it has been said it will be on the internet. Ignorance is no longer a justifiable reason for buying the wrong thing. Take the time to research in detail everything that you could possible want to know about

3. Testimonials - don't know anybody that has bought a Great Britain? Wrong! If the Great Britain is good the internet will let you know. Use the Internet as a friend and get testimonials before you buy.

4. Questions - Got a question about Great Britain then search the Forums, FAQ's, Blogs etc. Don't be afraid to ask .....

5. Reputation - Never heard of the company selling Great Britain? Don't worry, no reason why you should know every company in the world, but you know someone that does! Use the internet to find out what people are saying about Great Britain and build up a picture of their reputation for sales, returns, customer service, delivery etc.

6. Returns - still worried that even after all of the above your Great Britain wont be what you want? Check out the returns policy. There is so much competition now that someone, somewhere is bound to offer the terms that you are comfortable with.

7. Feedback - happy with your Great Britain then let people know, after all you are depending on others people input in your buying decision, so why not give a little back.

8. Security - check for the yellow padlock on the Great Britain site before you buy, and the s after http:/ /i.e. https:// = a secure site

9. Contact - got a question about Great Britain, or want to leave a comment then check out the sites contact page. Reputable companies have them and respond.

10. Payment - ready to pay for your Great Britain, then use your credit card or PayPal! Be aware of companies that don't accept them, there may be genuine reasons but given the huge amount of choice you have when buying online there is no reason at all not to buy via credit card or PayPal.

See also: Kingdom of Great Britain {{Infobox Islands|name = Great Britain|image name = LocationIslandGreatBritain.png|image caption = Great Britain lies between Ireland and mainland Europe|location = Western Europe|area = |highest mount = [Ben Nevis
[Scotland
Wales|country largest city area = 609 sq mi (1,577.3 km²)|population = 57,100,000|population as of = 2001|density =|ethnic groups = [English people, Scottish people, Welsh people, others-->Great Britain is the largest island of the British Isles. It lies to the northwest of Continental Europe, with Ireland to the west, and makes up the larger part of the territory of the United Kingdom. It is the largest island in Europe, and List of islands by area in the world. It is surrounded by over 1000 smaller islands and islets.

Geographical definition With an area of 209,331 square kilometre (80,823 square miles) the island of Great Britain is the largest of the British Isles.United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) ISLAND DIRECTORY TABLES "ISLANDS BY LAND AREA". Retrieved from http://islands.unep.ch/Tiarea.htm on August 25, 2006.It is the largest island in Europe, and List of islands by area in the world.It is the List of islands by population after Java (island) and Honshū.See Geohive.com Country data; Japan Census of 2000; United Kingdom Census of 2001. The editors of List of islands by population appear to have used similar data from the relevant statistics bureaux, and totalled up the various administrative districts that comprise each island, and then done the same for less populous islands. An editor of this article has not repeated that work. Therefore this plausible and eminently reasonable ranking is posted as unsourced Wikipedia:Common knowledge.

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).

Political definition Great Britain is no longer a country, but simply an island in the United Kingdom. Politically, "Great Britain" describes the combination of England, Scotland, and Wales, and therefore also includes a number of 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 other outlying islands such as the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands.

Great Britain has evolved politically from the gradual union of Kingdom of England and Kingdom of Scotland which started in 1603 with the Union of Crowns under James VI of Scotland and eventually resulted in the Acts of Union in 1707 which merged the parliaments of each nation and thus resulted in the formation of the Kingdom of Great Britain, which covered the entire island, 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 in 1922 following the independence of five-sixths of Ireland as first the Irish Free State, a Dominion of the then Commonwealth of Nations, and then later as an independent republic outside the British Commonwealth as the Republic of Ireland.

History Great Britain was formed around 9000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene ice age when sea levels rose due to isostatic depression of the crust and the melting of glaciers.

Great Britain was first inhabited by people who crossed over the land bridge from the European mainland. Its Iron Age inhabitants are known as the Brythons, a group speaking a Celtic languages, and most of it (not the northernmost part) was conquered to become the Ancient Rome province of Britannia. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Brythons of the south and east of the island became assimilated by colonising Germanic peoples tribes (Anglo-Saxons) who became known as the English people. Beyond Hadrian's wall, the major ethnic groups were the Ancient Scots, who may have emigrated from Ireland, and the Picts as well as other Brythonic peoples in the Kingdom of Strathclyde. The south-east of Scotland was colonised by the Angles and formed, until 1018, a part of the Kingdom of Northumbria. To speakers of Germanic languages, the Brythons were called Welsh, a term that came eventually to be applied exclusively to the inhabitants of what is now Wales, but which survives also in names like Wallace (surname). In subsequent centuries Vikings settled in several parts of the island, and The Norman Conquest introduced a French ruling élite who also became assimilated.

Since the Acts of Union 1707, the entire island has been one political unit, firstly as the Kingdom of Great Britain, later as part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and then as part of the present United Kingdom. Since the formation of this unified state, the adjective British has come to refer to things associated with the United Kingdom generally, such as citizenship, and not the island of Great Britain.

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 and Caves near Bristol, the remains of animal species 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.Lacey, Robert. Great Tales from English History. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2004. ISBN 0-316-10910-X.

Albion (Alouion in Ptolemy) is the most ancient name of Great Britain. It is sometimes used now to refer to England specifically. Occasionally, it refers to Scotland, which is called Alba in Gaelic, Albain in Irish, and Yr Alban in Welsh. Pliny the Elder in his Natural History (iv.xvi.102) applies it unequivocally to Great Britain. Etymologically the name 'Britain' may be derived from 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 #Nomenclature.

The term was used officially for the first time during the reign of James 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. Proclamation styling James I King of Great Britain on October 20, 1604 In 1707, an Act of Union 1707 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 formal 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 1800, 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 Counties of Ireland attained independence to form a separate Irish Free State. The remaining truncated kingdom has therefore since then been known as the United Kingdom.

Use and nomenclature Use of the term Great Britain "Great Britain" is often used to mean the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" (UK). However, Great Britain is only the largest island within the United Kingdom, which includes numerous surrounding smaller islands, as well as Northern Ireland in the island of Ireland. In the introduction to his history book The Isles, Norman Davies explains how confusion persists about what "Great Britain" and the "United Kingdom" actually denote in even some eminent educational institutions.Davies, Norman (1990) The Isles. A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-513442-7

Terms associated with Great Britain – such as Britain or British – are generally used as short forms for the United Kingdom or its citizens respectively.

Great Britain and its abbreviations GB and GBR are used in some international codes as a synonym for the United Kingdom, largely due to potential confusion with "UA" or "UKR" for UkraineUkraine has ISO 3166 codes ISO 3166-2:UA and ISO 3166-1 alpha-3. Examples include: Universal Postal Union, the International Olympic Committee, international sports teams, NATO, the ISO 3166-1, and other organisations. (See also Country codes: U-Z#United Kingdom, List of international license plate codes, and technical standards such as the ISO 3166 geocodes ISO 3166-2:GB and ISO 3166-1 alpha-3.)

On the Internet, .uk is used as a country code top-level domain for the United Kingdom. A .gb top-level domain was also used to a limited extent in the past, but this is now effectively in wikt:abeyance because the domain name registrar will not take new registrations. The Republic of Ireland has its own separate Internet code - .ie .

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".{{cite book | last = Snyder | first = Christopher A. | title = The Britons | publisher = [Blackwell Publishing | date = 2003 | id = ISBN 0-631-22260-X --> The name ''Britannia'' derived from the travel writings of the [ancient Greece [Pytheas around [320 BC, which described various islands in the North Atlantic as far North as Thule (probably Iceland) "See summary of Pytheas' Voyage" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pytheas#Voyage . Although Pytheas' own writings do not survive, later Greek writers described the islands as the αι Βρεττανιαι or the ''Brittanic Isles''.{{cite book | last = Foster (editor) | first = R F | authorlink = | coauthors = Donnchadh O Corrain, Professor of Irish History at University College Cork: (Chapter 1: ''Prehistoric and Early Christian Ireland'') | title = The Oxford History of Ireland | publisher = Oxford University Press | date = 1 November [ | location = | url = | doi = | id = ISBN 0-19-280202-X --> The peoples of these islands of ''Prettanike'' were called the Πρεττανοι, ''Priteni'' or ''Pretani''. These names derived from a Celtic languages name which is likely to have reached Pytheas from the [Gauls, who may have used it as their term for the inhabitants of the islands.[http://www.celticgrounds.com/chapters/encyclopedia/p.html Encyclopedia of the Celts: Pretani ''Priteni'' is the source of the [Welsh language term [Prydain, ''Britain'', which has the same source as the [Goidelic languages term [Cruithne (people) used to refer to the early [Brythonic languages speaking inhabitants of Ireland and the north of [Scotland. The latter were later called [Picts or [Caledonians by the [Ancient Rome.

During Roman times, the term Britannia was applied to the Roman province of Britain, which occupied most of the island of Great Britain, and to the island as a whole.

(See British Isles (terminology) for further discussion of etymology).

Great Britain may well be a translation of the French language 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 may have naturally passed into English usage. The term "Bretayne the grete" was used by chroniclers as early as 1338, but it was not used officially until James I of England proclaimed himself "King of Great Britain" on 20 October 1604 to avoid the more cumbersome title "King of England and Scotland". Sources such as the New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD) define Great Britain as "England, Wales, and Scotland considered as a unit" and Britain as "an island that consists of England, Wales, and Scotland." Thus, Britain is the name of the island, while Great Britain is the name of the geopolitical unit. NOAD advises that while Britain "is broadly synonymous with Great Britain ... the longer form is usual for the political unit." However, in the United Kingdom itself, "Britain" is usually taken to be synonymous with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland http://www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide/page/0,,184840,00.html.

'Minor' Britain In Geoffrey of Monmouth's Pseudohistory 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.

In Irish language, Wales is referred to as An Bhreatain Bheag which means, literally, Little Britain, although a truer translation would be Britain Minor. On the other hand, the closely-related language, Scottish Gaelic language, uses the 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 streets in the City of London and in Dorchester, Dorset. The street in London was named in honour of the former embassy of the Duchy of Brittany, which was located there.

Capital cities

Other major settlements

Other islands of the archipelago

References External links

See also: Kingdom of Great Britain {{Infobox Islands|name = Great Britain|image name = LocationIslandGreatBritain.png|image caption = Great Britain lies between Ireland and mainland Europe|location = Western Europe|area = |highest mount = [Ben Nevis
[Scotland
Wales|country largest city area = 609 sq mi (1,577.3 km²)|population = 57,100,000|population as of = 2001|density =|ethnic groups = [English people, Scottish people, Welsh people, others-->Great Britain is the largest island of the British Isles. It lies to the northwest of Continental Europe, with Ireland to the west, and makes up the larger part of the territory of the United Kingdom. It is the largest island in Europe, and List of islands by area in the world. It is surrounded by over 1000 smaller islands and islets.

Geographical definition With an area of 209,331 square kilometre (80,823 square miles) the island of Great Britain is the largest of the British Isles.United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) ISLAND DIRECTORY TABLES "ISLANDS BY LAND AREA". Retrieved from http://islands.unep.ch/Tiarea.htm on August 25, 2006.It is the largest island in Europe, and List of islands by area in the world.It is the List of islands by population after Java (island) and Honshū.See Geohive.com Country data; Japan Census of 2000; United Kingdom Census of 2001. The editors of List of islands by population appear to have used similar data from the relevant statistics bureaux, and totalled up the various administrative districts that comprise each island, and then done the same for less populous islands. An editor of this article has not repeated that work. Therefore this plausible and eminently reasonable ranking is posted as unsourced Wikipedia:Common knowledge.

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).

Political definition Great Britain is no longer a country, but simply an island in the United Kingdom. Politically, "Great Britain" describes the combination of England, Scotland, and Wales, and therefore also includes a number of 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 other outlying islands such as the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands.

Great Britain has evolved politically from the gradual union of Kingdom of England and Kingdom of Scotland which started in 1603 with the Union of Crowns under James VI of Scotland and eventually resulted in the Acts of Union in 1707 which merged the parliaments of each nation and thus resulted in the formation of the Kingdom of Great Britain, which covered the entire island, 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 in 1922 following the independence of five-sixths of Ireland as first the Irish Free State, a Dominion of the then Commonwealth of Nations, and then later as an independent republic outside the British Commonwealth as the Republic of Ireland.

History Great Britain was formed around 9000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene ice age when sea levels rose due to isostatic depression of the crust and the melting of glaciers.

Great Britain was first inhabited by people who crossed over the land bridge from the European mainland. Its Iron Age inhabitants are known as the Brythons, a group speaking a Celtic languages, and most of it (not the northernmost part) was conquered to become the Ancient Rome province of Britannia. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Brythons of the south and east of the island became assimilated by colonising Germanic peoples tribes (Anglo-Saxons) who became known as the English people. Beyond Hadrian's wall, the major ethnic groups were the Ancient Scots, who may have emigrated from Ireland, and the Picts as well as other Brythonic peoples in the Kingdom of Strathclyde. The south-east of Scotland was colonised by the Angles and formed, until 1018, a part of the Kingdom of Northumbria. To speakers of Germanic languages, the Brythons were called Welsh, a term that came eventually to be applied exclusively to the inhabitants of what is now Wales, but which survives also in names like Wallace (surname). In subsequent centuries Vikings settled in several parts of the island, and The Norman Conquest introduced a French ruling élite who also became assimilated.

Since the Acts of Union 1707, the entire island has been one political unit, firstly as the Kingdom of Great Britain, later as part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and then as part of the present United Kingdom. Since the formation of this unified state, the adjective British has come to refer to things associated with the United Kingdom generally, such as citizenship, and not the island of Great Britain.

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 and Caves near Bristol, the remains of animal species 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.Lacey, Robert. Great Tales from English History. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2004. ISBN 0-316-10910-X.

Albion (Alouion in Ptolemy) is the most ancient name of Great Britain. It is sometimes used now to refer to England specifically. Occasionally, it refers to Scotland, which is called Alba in Gaelic, Albain in Irish, and Yr Alban in Welsh. Pliny the Elder in his Natural History (iv.xvi.102) applies it unequivocally to Great Britain. Etymologically the name 'Britain' may be derived from 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 #Nomenclature.

The term was used officially for the first time during the reign of James 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. Proclamation styling James I King of Great Britain on October 20, 1604 In 1707, an Act of Union 1707 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 formal 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 1800, 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 Counties of Ireland attained independence to form a separate Irish Free State. The remaining truncated kingdom has therefore since then been known as the United Kingdom.

Use and nomenclature Use of the term Great Britain "Great Britain" is often used to mean the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" (UK). However, Great Britain is only the largest island within the United Kingdom, which includes numerous surrounding smaller islands, as well as Northern Ireland in the island of Ireland. In the introduction to his history book The Isles, Norman Davies explains how confusion persists about what "Great Britain" and the "United Kingdom" actually denote in even some eminent educational institutions.Davies, Norman (1990) The Isles. A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-513442-7

Terms associated with Great Britain – such as Britain or British – are generally used as short forms for the United Kingdom or its citizens respectively.

Great Britain and its abbreviations GB and GBR are used in some international codes as a synonym for the United Kingdom, largely due to potential confusion with "UA" or "UKR" for UkraineUkraine has ISO 3166 codes ISO 3166-2:UA and ISO 3166-1 alpha-3. Examples include: Universal Postal Union, the International Olympic Committee, international sports teams, NATO, the ISO 3166-1, and other organisations. (See also Country codes: U-Z#United Kingdom, List of international license plate codes, and technical standards such as the ISO 3166 geocodes ISO 3166-2:GB and ISO 3166-1 alpha-3.)

On the Internet, .uk is used as a country code top-level domain for the United Kingdom. A .gb top-level domain was also used to a limited extent in the past, but this is now effectively in wikt:abeyance because the domain name registrar will not take new registrations. The Republic of Ireland has its own separate Internet code - .ie .

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".{{cite book | last = Snyder | first = Christopher A. | title = The Britons | publisher = [Blackwell Publishing | date = 2003 | id = ISBN 0-631-22260-X --> The name ''Britannia'' derived from the travel writings of the [ancient Greece [Pytheas around [320 BC, which described various islands in the North Atlantic as far North as Thule (probably Iceland) "See summary of Pytheas' Voyage" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pytheas#Voyage . Although Pytheas' own writings do not survive, later Greek writers described the islands as the αι Βρεττανιαι or the ''Brittanic Isles''.{{cite book | last = Foster (editor) | first = R F | authorlink = | coauthors = Donnchadh O Corrain, Professor of Irish History at University College Cork: (Chapter 1: ''Prehistoric and Early Christian Ireland'') | title = The Oxford History of Ireland | publisher = Oxford University Press | date = 1 November [ | location = | url = | doi = | id = ISBN 0-19-280202-X --> The peoples of these islands of ''Prettanike'' were called the Πρεττανοι, ''Priteni'' or ''Pretani''. These names derived from a Celtic languages name which is likely to have reached Pytheas from the [Gauls, who may have used it as their term for the inhabitants of the islands.[http://www.celticgrounds.com/chapters/encyclopedia/p.html Encyclopedia of the Celts: Pretani ''Priteni'' is the source of the [Welsh language term [Prydain, ''Britain'', which has the same source as the [Goidelic languages term [Cruithne (people) used to refer to the early [Brythonic languages speaking inhabitants of Ireland and the north of [Scotland. The latter were later called [Picts or [Caledonians by the [Ancient Rome.

During Roman times, the term Britannia was applied to the Roman province of Britain, which occupied most of the island of Great Britain, and to the island as a whole.

(See British Isles (terminology) for further discussion of etymology).

Great Britain may well be a translation of the French language 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 may have naturally passed into English usage. The term "Bretayne the grete" was used by chroniclers as early as 1338, but it was not used officially until James I of England proclaimed himself "King of Great Britain" on 20 October 1604 to avoid the more cumbersome title "King of England and Scotland". Sources such as the New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD) define Great Britain as "England, Wales, and Scotland considered as a unit" and Britain as "an island that consists of England, Wales, and Scotland." Thus, Britain is the name of the island, while Great Britain is the name of the geopolitical unit. NOAD advises that while Britain "is broadly synonymous with Great Britain ... the longer form is usual for the political unit." However, in the United Kingdom itself, "Britain" is usually taken to be synonymous with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland http://www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide/page/0,,184840,00.html.

'Minor' Britain In Geoffrey of Monmouth's Pseudohistory 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.

In Irish language, Wales is referred to as An Bhreatain Bheag which means, literally, Little Britain, although a truer translation would be Britain Minor. On the other hand, the closely-related language, Scottish Gaelic language, uses the 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 streets in the City of London and in Dorchester, Dorset. The street in London was named in honour of the former embassy of the Duchy of Brittany, which was located there.

Capital cities

Other major settlements

Other islands of the archipelago

References External links



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