Timor-Leste 🇹🇱

Timor-Leste is a sovereign country in South-Eastern Asia, in the wider region of Asia. In formal use it is Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste. The capital is Dili.

Some 1.4 million people call it home, placing it 155th of 250 by population — between Bahrain above it and Estonia below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 9th of 11 in size and 10th in population.

Its territory runs to 14,874 km², which ranks it 161st of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Eswatini and just ahead of the Bahamas. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is around a quarter larger than Qatar.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 8.8° south, 125.9° east, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 983 km from the equator, in what geographers would call the equatorial belt.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Brazil, Peru and Tuvalu — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

Its land neighbours number 1: Indonesia.

It has both a coastline and land borders, which is the most common arrangement of all.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 94 people per square kilometre, which makes it more crowded than the typical entry on this list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 90 per square kilometre.

People from Timor-Leste are called East Timorese.

2 languages carry official status: Portuguese and Tetum. Tetum is listed for no other entry in this dataset, which makes it effectively unique to Timor-Leste. Portuguese, the first listed, is shared with 9 other entries worldwide.

Inside Asia it places 46th of 50 by population, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in South-Eastern Asia.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Timor-Leste ranks 161st of 250 by area and 155th by population. That works out at less than a thousandth of a percent of the combined land area of all 250 entries and 0.017% of their combined population. Those denominators matter: this list includes territories and dependencies as well as UN member states, so a rank here is not the same as a rank among sovereign countries.

For a sense of scale, the entries immediately either side of Timor-Leste in the size ordering are Eswatini at 17,364 km² and Bahamas at 13,943 km², against Timor-Leste's 14,874 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Timor-Leste averages 94 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 122nd of the 248 entries that have both a population and a measured area. Total area includes inland water, so the true figure for habitable land is higher than this.

Zoom in from the world to South-Eastern Asia and Timor-Leste sits 10th of 11 by population and 9th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Singapore just above and Brunei just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

Indonesia is the largest of the group by population, and every entry in South-Eastern Asia has its own page here if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time.

• 🇸🇬 Singapore
• 🇧🇳 Brunei
• 🇮🇩 Indonesia

Timor-Leste does not have the United States dollar to itself. It is one of 20 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is USD, and the others include listed below. A shared currency usually points at something real — a monetary union, a currency board, a former colonial administration, or a small economy pegging itself to a large neighbour's money — and it means a price quoted in USD travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. Portuguese is listed for 10 entries here, Timor-Leste among them, so a visitor who speaks it can be understood across a large part of the map. Shared language tends to outlive the empires, trade routes and migrations that spread it, which is why the linguistic map and the political one rarely line up.

Money there is the United States dollar ($, USD). That is a shared currency: 19 other entries use it, including American Samoa, the Bahamas, the British Indian Ocean Territory, the British Virgin Islands and Cambodia.

Websites there use the .tl domain. The international dialling code is +670. Its ISO codes are tl and TLS, which is what most databases and flag files use.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Timor-Leste, the answer is Dili.

As a sovereign state it is among the 193 UN members listed here. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 250 rather than the familiar 195.