Ptolemy already distinguished “great” Britain from Ireland
Great Britain—England, Scotland, and Wales on one island—covers 209,331 km², Europe’s largest isle and the world’s ninth. About 61 million people lived there in 2011, making it the third-most-populous island after Honshu and Java.
Footprints and stone tools at Happisburgh in Norfolk show archaic humans here around 950,000 to 850,000 years ago, when Britain was still a peninsula of Europe; catastrophic flooding about 450,000 years ago began to cut it off, and the low Doggerland link finally drowned roughly 9,000 years ago. Neolithic farmers of Anatolian descent arrived around 4000 BC and replaced the hunter-gatherers, the Bell Beaker culture followed around 2000 BC, and Celtic tribes held the island in the Iron Age before Rome conquered it as far as Hadrian’s Wall.
The oldest recorded name is Albion, perhaps from Latin albus, white, for the cliffs of Dover. The word Britain first surfaced in a lost Greek account of the voyages of Pytheas; the islanders were called Pretani, source of Welsh Prydain, and Romans wrote Britannia. In the Almagest of 147–148 CE Ptolemy called the larger island megale Brettania and Ireland mikra Brettania, great and little Britain.
Around 1136 Geoffrey of Monmouth contrasted Britannia major with Britannia minor, the Brittany settled by Britons in the fifth and sixth centuries. A 1474 marriage treaty used the phrase officially, praising the noble isle of Gret Britanee, and in 1707 the Acts of Union, ratifying the 1706 treaty, merged the parliaments of England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain.
Politically the term covers England, Scotland, and Wales with islands such as Anglesey, the Isle of Wight, the Hebrides, Orkney, and Shetland, but not Northern Ireland, though usage blurs even in government documents. International codes such as GB and GBR stand for the whole United Kingdom, the .gb internet domain has been deprecated in favour of .uk, and the Olympic squad competes as Team GB.
Source: Great Britain
