Where I'm from, when you say "biggest" country, it's by default population unless specified otherwise. Area really isn't an important metric here (unless your country is tiny), because the ability of economic and industrial output scales with population more than with area. The most logical comparison would be by GDP here, because we're comparing economy.

But for population, which is what I think about when specifying country size without any explanation:

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

Germany is #3 here. You'll see that Russia and Turkey are partly in Europe and bigger than Germany, but since they're mostly in Asia I think most people wouldn't consider them mainly European but rather mainly Asian. There's bound to be some discussion here since it really isn't very clear cut. I'll rephrase to "Germany is at least the third-biggest country in Europe".

Also, colloquially Europeans consider Russia to be an uncivilized backwater, so they don't count. Turkey is considered more middle-east.

>Also, colloquially Europeans consider Russia to be an uncivilized backwater, so they don't count.

citation needed. Otherwise, your prejudice has no place here.

Chill... It's not like they're saying it publicly within earshot. Only the Finns, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Polish, Ukrainians and Moldovans do that.

Most of the population of Russia is in Europe and it was always considered European country, just like Britain, France, Spain or Portugal of the colonial period.

Thanks, fwiw, Russia is still #1 by population if you only count population in Europe.

That's definitely fair. I just blurped it out that way because, at least in my experience, Russia isn't really considered a European country "colloquially". At least where I'm from, people would usually say it's Asian when asked what continent Russia belongs to (if they had to pick one).

But I agree it doesn't really hold up to more detailed scrutiny.

> At least where I'm from, people would usually say it's Asian when asked what continent Russia belongs to (if they had to pick one).

Heh, that's quite funny, where are you from? :-)

> At least where I'm from, people would usually say it's Asian when asked what continent Russia belongs to (if they had to pick one).

I believe you, but those people would then be wrong :-).

When people speak about Europe, they are rarely including Russia and Turkey.

Or just the biggest in the EU.

Depends on the metric you use. If we take nominal GDP instead of area, Germany is #1 in Europe [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...

I'm sure he meant by population

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

Russia and Türkiye are partly in Asia, so not really completely European

France, Portugal, Spain, UK, Netherlands, Denmark too are partially located outside Europe.

Maybe he means by GDP. That would fit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...

It may be unintuitive to you, but "the biggest" in many cases means "most populous" and Germany is that - we don't count Russia (because it is not entirely in Europe) or Turkey (for a similar reason) really.

Population of European Russia is ~110 million people so a bit more than Germany.

If you want to be pendantic: the biggest country by population in the EU. I don't think area has any relevance in the context of this discussion.

Economy does not come from the geographical size, it comes from the people inhabitating it.

They’re probably talking GDP