Review The wrong use of England as a synonym for Great Britain or the United Kingdom is very frequent, an option that can be offensive to Scots, Welsh, and Northern Irish. England is the largest and most densely populated of the constituent countries of the United Kingdom. It occupies two thirds of the island of Great Britain and borders Scotland to the north and Wales to the west. At the end of the Roman mandate over Britain (the southern part of Great Britain), the island was invaded by both Celtic peoples from Scotland and Ireland and by Germanic tribes from the present-day Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark, mainly Angles, Saxons, and jutes. These tribes ended up merging with each other and, in a certain way, with the local population, mainly the Britons, founding a series of kingdoms in the southeast of Britain. The Franks gave this area the Latin name Anglae terra ("Land of the Angles"), which later came to be used in most of Europe. Later the English themselves transl...