Sizes compared: https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTc1MjkzMTg.MTg2MDcyNg*...

Warning: link hijacks history.

Just to clarify because it was unclear to me, that's North and South Americas together that make up 42 million km^2. North America alone makes up 24,7 million km^2.

Some parts of the world consider the Americas one continent. See here, for example: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskEurope/comments/7nuqu2/are_the_a...

Yep, for us in Italy the continents are 5: America, Eurasia, Antarctica, Africa, Oceania (Australia + New Zealand + several minor isles).

Geographically speaking, we then have North America (Canada, USA), Central America (Mexico to strait of Panama), South America, and Caribbeans.

I've always thought a few school subjects should be put off until kids are mature enough to "get" them.

One is history class (much more meaningful when you are old enough to understand human nature) and another is mercator projections.

I always thought Canada was so much bigger than the US but they're about the same size - 3.5m sq miles.

> another is mercator projections.

That's why for centuries the globes were both produced and used:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdapfel

Globes -- since 1492. Every child can understand that.

One of my memories that always makes me chuckle was an argument I had with my older sibling about this. I always thought Canada was bigger than the US, but only based on how long it takes to get between city centers in the middle part.

Population density was hard for 9 year old me to grasp. But oh, boy, was I certain I was right.

> I always thought Canada was so much bigger than the US but they're about the same size - 3.5m sq miles.

You can thank Mercator for that. And, these days, Google and Apple for still using it (Google Maps is a globe on PC but still Mercator on iOS. Apple Maps is Mercator only).

> I always thought Canada was so much bigger than the US but they're about the same size - 3.5m sq miles

That's because the largest state, Alaska, appears like its a part of the Canadian landmass

I think this shows it best:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Worlds_a...

Does that include Greenland? - which is part of the America continent.

How strange that, of all 35 sovereign nations in the Americas, it's the citizens of the only one to have "America" in its name that call their country America!

It must be an obsession, because it couldn't be the desire to carve five syllables off our nine-syllable mouthful of a legal name.

I mean. I guess we could just call ourselves the Union, for short. Or the States, something like that.

But definitely not all three. That would just be silly.

You're really stretching with the word "obsession", not to mention being inflammatory. It's an abbreviation that happens to lose specificity (as you might expect of an abbreviation - therefore, one must depend on context). In addition, it's a gonna globally common abbreviation. I'm sure the relative commonness of "the US" is higher outside the US, but many people outside the US still call it America too.

Which makes a great point about how big Canada is compared to the US. We seem to misuse the term "America" to point only to one part of one of the Americas. Maybe it would be actually less confusing if we would refer to North America as the Canada continent? It would reduce the name conflicts by half and we would use as proxy the biggest country on the continent. There would also be the additional benefit of people not refering to Texas as "South America".

We could then call South America South Canadia.