Make the United States Number One (Alphabetically)

Inspired by the Clickhole/Onion article “Embarrassing: The U.S. Is Ranked 182nd In The World Alphabetically” I decided to take action.

Finding the List of Countries

The article states that the list of countries is 195 countries. The US Department of State lists 203 different countries (204 if you count East Timor and Timor-Leste separately). What’s really infuriating about this list is that it doesn’t even contain the United States.

Next to the source of all knowledge. No, not Google - Wikipedia. Wikipedia lists 193 “member states” of the United Nations, of which the United States is 185 alphabetically:

I guess 193 is close enough to 195 and 185 is close enough to 182, plus the fact the US is on this list, so we’ll use this list.

Going French

French for “United States of America” is “États-Unis d’Amérique.” So if we use the French language in our list, the United States, er, I mean, États-Unis becomes number 58 alphabetically:

However, with the advent of Freedom Fries, some people might not be too keen on using the French language to name the country.

Repositioning Words

You know how in certain lists, certain parts of the title are out of order? For instance, “Great Gatsby, The.” The list already does that with Iran, calling it “Iran (Islamic Republic of).”

So let’s refer to this great country as “America, United States of.” Now we’re getting someplace - number four alphabetically:

Now what?

Currently, Afghanistan is number one. To get to number one, we have to somehow put a letter that comes before “f” after the first “A” - so that means either a, b, c, d, or e. We could try replacing the “m”:

Aaerica, Aberica, Acerica, Aderica, Aerica.

None of these make sense. Okay, let’s inserting between the “A” and “m”:

Aamerica, Abmerica, Acmerica, Admerica, Aemerica

Honestly, I prefer “Aamerica, United States of” or even “A America, United States of.” We can’t call it just America, though, or people might think we’re the Americas.