Things by Letter

Sources and method

Which countries are counted

The country lists cover the 193 UN member states plus Vatican City: 194 in all. Nothing else is listed as a country, and the site does not publish maps.

Where the names come from

Each country is headed by the name most English readers search for, which is usually its Wikidata English label. The names come from the Wikidata English label, the UN M49 name and the Natural Earth name fields NAME, NAME_EN and NAME_ALT, plus NAME_CIAWF (the CIA World Factbook short name) when it is a plain name with no comma or brackets. Any of these spellings that differs from the heading is shown as “also listed as”, with the source in brackets, and the country appears on the page for each of those first letters too. 29 countries have more than one name in these sources. Short forms with abbreviations, the Czech-language form “Česko”, and spellings that differ only in accents or capital letters, are not repeated.

A leading “The” is skipped when filing, so The Gambia is under G.

Fruits

The fruit lists come from one file, USDA Agricultural Research Service, FoodData Central, SR Legacy (April 2018), CSV download, public domain (CC0). The copy used here:

From the 355 entries in the food category “Fruits and Fruit Juices”, a fruit is listed when its USDA description has “raw” as a part of its own (70 fruits, labelled “raw”); failing that, when a part reads “raw or frozen” (1, labelled “raw or frozen”); failing that, when the description is just the fruit and its variety, with no processing word at all (2, labelled “as listed”, as with “Dates, medjool”). An entry is left out if its description contains any of “babyfood”, “baby food”, “fruit cocktail”, “mixed fruit”, “fruit salad”, “cooked”, “canned”, “frozen”, “dried”, “dehydrated”, “syrup”, “sweetened”, “candied”, “smoothie”, “blend”, “boiled”, “fried”, “baked”, “restaurant”, “puree”, “juice”, “nectar”, or if the part before the first comma contains any of “juice”, “nectar”, “peel”, “sauce”, “puree”, “powder”, “pulp”, “relish”, “mixed”, “cocktail”, “salad”, “babyfood”, “raisins”. That keeps out foods for infants, fruit mixes, juices and every processed form; 248 entries are left out this way. Entries that share a first part are one fruit (for melons the second part names it, as in Cantaloupe). 14 fruits have more than one entry of the same kind; for those the entry with the lowest FDC ID is used, and the page gives its full USDA description and FDC ID. Names are printed as USDA writes them, with only the first letter capitalized; a name USDA gives in brackets is shown as “also listed as”, and the fruit appears under that letter too.

The figure on each fruit is the Energy value in kilocalories per 100 grams from the same entry, and the label beside it says which of the three kinds that entry is.

Checking

The lists are built from saved copies of these files, not typed by hand; a build stops if a page names anything outside the 194. Files last checked September 29, 2026.

Our link checker identifies itself as ThingsByLetterBot and follows each site's robots.txt. Spot a wrong or missing name? Write to hello@thingsbyletter.com.