Noun

nations pl.

1. Plural form of nation.

Anagrams

• anoints
• onanist

A nation is a group of people who share common history, culture, ethnic origin and language, often possessing or seeking its own government. The development and conceptualization of a nation is closely related to the development of modern industrial states and nationalist movements in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although nationalists would trace nations into the past along uninterrupted lines of historical narrative. Though the idea of nationality and race are often connected, the two are separate concepts, race dealing more with genotypic and phenotypic similarity and clustering, and nationality with the sense of belonging to a culture.

A nation is different from a country in that a country is the land that belongs to a nation, and from a state in that a state is the government of the nation and country.

Benedict Anderson argued that nations were "imagined communities" because "the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion", and traced their origins back to vernacular print journalism, which by its very nature was limited with linguistic zones and addressed a common audience. Although "nation" is also commonly used in informal discourse as a synonym for state or country, a nation is not identical to a state. Countries where the social concept of "nation" coincides with the political concept of "state" are called nation states.

Nations is often used synonymously with ethnic group, but although ethnicity is now one of the most important aspects of cultural or social identity for the members of most nations, people with the same ethnic origin may live in different nation-states and be treated as members of separate nations for that reason.

• "Nations, like men, have their infancy."
  • Henry Bolingbroke, Letters on Study and Use of History (1752)

• "A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestory and by a common hatred of its neighbors."
  • William Ralph Inge, The Perpetual Pessimist

• "The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes."
  • Stanley Kubrick, The Guardian (1963)

• "No man has a right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation; no man has a right to say to his country - thus far shalt thou go and no further."
  • Charles Stewart Parnell, speech (1885)

• "No nation is fit to sit in judgement upon any other nation."
  • Woodrow Wilson, speech (1915)