A nation is a body of people who share a common history, culture, language or ethnic origin, who typically inhabit a particular country or territory. The development and conceptualisation of the nation is closely related to the development of modern industrial states and nationalist movements in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, although nationalists would trace nations into the past along an uninterrupted lines of historical narrative.

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.

Though "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.

Ambiguity in usage

In the strict sense, terms such as "nation", "ethnos", and "people" (as in "the Danish people") denote a group of human beings. The concepts of nation and nationality have much in common with ethnic group and ethnicity, but have a more political connotation, since they imply the possibility of a nation-state. Country denominates a geographical territory,Fact: date=January 2009 whereas state expresses a legitimized administrative and decision-making institution. Confusingly, the terms national and international are used as technical terms applying to states. International law, for instance, applies to relations between states, and occasionally between states on the one side, and individuals or legal persons on the other. Likewise, the United Nations represent sovereign states, while nations, per se, are not admitted.

Etymology and early use

The English word "nation" is derived from the Latin term natio (, stem ), meaning:

• The action of being born; birth; or
• The goddess personifying birth; or
• A breed, stock, kind, species, race; or
• A tribe, or (rhetorically, any) set of people (contemptuous); or
• A nation or people.

As an example of how the word natio was employed in classical Latin, consider the following quote from Cicero's Philippics Against Mark Antony in 44 BC. Cicero contrasts the external, inferior nationes ("races of people") with the Roman civitas ("community").:

"Omnes nationes servitutem ferre possunt: nostra civitas non potest."
("All races are able to bear enslavement, but our community cannot.")M. Tullius Cicero, Orationes: Pro Milone, Pro Marcello, Pro Ligario, Pro rege Deiotaro, Philippicae I-XIV (ed. Albert Clark, Oxford 1918.) Online at 1