A county is a land area of local government within a country. A county may have cities and towns within its area.

History

Originally, in continental Europe, a county (comté, Grafschaft) was the land under the jurisdiction of a count (comte, Graf).

Counts are called earls in post-Celtic Britain and Ireland—the term is from Old Norse jarl and was introduced by the Vikings—but there is no correlation between counties and earldoms. Rather, county, from French comté, was simply used by the Normans after 1066 to replace the native English term scir (1)—Modern English shire, as the Anglo-Saxon system of Shires was unique and thus hard for the Norman invaders to comprehendFact: date=February 2009 so they resorted to calling them Counties. A shire was an administrative division of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom (Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, etc.), usually named after its administrative centre: for example, Gloucester, in Gloucestershire; Worcester, in Worcestershire; etc. or originate from these forms of names (e.g. Wiltshire derived from 'Wiltonshire' with Wilton as its old county town).

Thus, whereas the word comté denoted a sovereign jurisdiction in the original French, the English county denotes a subdivision of a sovereign jurisdiction.

* The 32 refers to the counties of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland combined. For more information, see the sections on Ireland and United Kingdom]] below.

Austria

Each Austrian state (in German Bundesland, plural Bundesländer) is divided in a number of counties (in German Bezirk, plural Bezirke). Sometimes, the word "Bezirk" is translated by "district" instead of county.

Each county is subdivided in towns or villages. Some larger towns do not form part of a county and are governed by a unitary administration instead which counts both for city administration as well as county governance.

The federal capital Vienna is considered as a state as well. The capital government of Vienna is responsible for state, county and town governance. Vienna is subdivided in boroughs which are called "Bezirk" in German as well, but have a different function than the counties in the other federal states.

see also: [[Districts of Austria

Australia

main: Cadastral divisions of Australia The eastern Australian states, and parts of the western states were divided into counties, mostly in the nineteenth century. These were further subdivided into parishes in New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and Queensland; and hundreds in South Australia. The counties currently have no political function, and became dead letters for most purposes other than the registration of land ownership, and are unknown by most of the population today. Local Government Areas including shires, municipalities and others are instead used in Australia as the second level subdivision.