---
title: "What is the size of Yemen?"
slug: what-is-the-size-of-yemen
url: https://listedarticles.com/articles/what-is-the-size-of-yemen
canonical_url: https://theborys.substack.com/p/what-is-the-size-of-yemen
content_type: essay
language: en
published_at: 2024-11-27T12:00:00.000Z
updated_at: 2026-09-27T12:15:03.081Z
author: "TheBorys"
author_url: https://theborys.substack.com
authored_by: human
publisher: "TheBorys’s Substack"
publisher_url: https://theborys.substack.com
topics: ["History", "Science", "Culture", "Opinion"]
license: all-rights-reserved
word_count: 319
reading_minutes: 1
citation: "TheBorys, TheBorys’s Substack. \"What is the size of Yemen?.\" 27 Nov 2024. https://theborys.substack.com/p/what-is-the-size-of-yemen (all-rights-reserved)"
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---

# What is the size of Yemen?

> Investigative essay tracing why Wikipedia, CIA Factbook, and UN figures overstate Yemen’s area by ~100,000 km²—from Ottoman vilayet tables and a 1976 World Bank double-count to post-unification copy-paste.

# What is the size of Yemen?

### Uncovering a century-old misinformation

*TheBorys — 27 November 2024*

Have you ever asked yourself, “What is the size of Yemen?” A comment under a video claimed the commonly cited figure was wrong. Google and Wikipedia said ~555,000 km². Drawing the borders on Google Maps — including islands such as Socotra — yielded about **456,000 km²**. The missing area was roughly a quarter of the country.

## Where 555k km² came from

The oldest clear source found was the Statistical Year-book of the Yemen Arab Republic (Central Statistical Office, 1991), the first after unification. The text said Yemen stretched to the 20th North latitude — but the northernmost point under the border agreement with Saudi Arabia is at the 19th. Before 2000 the Saudi border was poorly demarcated; drawing to 20° (including Rub-Al-Khali) roughly reproduces the inflated figure.

## Where 527k km² came from

The CIA World Factbook (and World Bank / UN repeats) claimed 527,968 km² — still far from the map measurement. That number appears from 1991 as the sum of separate North Yemen (195,000) and South Yemen (332,968) Factbook entries.

**North Yemen:** 195,000 km² traces to a 1904 encyclopedia figure for the Ottoman Yemeni Vilayet (~75,000 sq mi), not independent North Yemen (map measure ~136,000). Sources repeated the vilayet size for decades without fact-checking.

**South Yemen:** Sources showed ~287,000 until the late 1970s, then jumped to ~332–338k. A 1976 World Bank report table of governorate areas double-counted Thamud (part of the Fifth Province), overestimating the total; later references copied the error.

## Closing thought

Unrelated exaggerations for North and South were summed at unification into a still-wrong national figure. Consequences called out by the author: population density, UN size ranking, and “slightly larger than twice Wyoming” comparisons are all off. A century of unexamined geographic tables is hard to unwind — but the map measurement is clear.

*Source: [theborys.substack.com/p/what-is-the-size-of-yemen](https://theborys.substack.com/p/what-is-the-size-of-yemen)*