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Originally, the land under the jurisdiction of a count by reason of that office, a county has since tended to represent a geographical unit of administration intermediate between a region, province or state and a district or municipality.

In England, the county boundaries have varied considerably over the centuries. When the counties were originally defined, they often included large areas of land owned by the local Abbeys, resulting in a number of counties having small detached parts entirely surrounded by some other county. After boundary changes from the 1880s to the 1960s, many of these anomalies were resolved and a number of parishes were moved to the local government of a more logical county. The last such anomalies were removed by the local government reorganisation in 1974.

In the 1974 reorganisation, six new metropolitan counties were created to administer the larger urban areas: the West Midlands (covering Birmingham, Coventry, Wolverhampton and the Black Country, and including former parts of Warwickshire, Staffordshire and Worcestershire); Greater Manchester; Merseyside (Liverpool and neighbouring districts); West Yorkshire (Leeds, Bradford and nearby towns); South Yorkshire (Sheffield, Barnsley and Doncaster); and Tyne and Wear (Newcastle and Sunderland). Additional non-metropolitan counties were created for areas centred on a major city but divided by former county boundaries, in Avon (Bristol and surroundings), Humberside (Hull) and Cleveland (Middlesbrough/Teesside).

The metropolitan counties were abolished as administrative entities in 1986 along with the county of Greater London (created in 1965) and broken up into their constituent districts, though statistical data are still published for the 1974-86 county areas. Avon, Humberside and Cleveland were also scrapped in 1996, their districts becoming unitary authorities combining county and district functions, and 1999 saw the restoration of Rutland, the smallest county in England, and Herefordshire, merged respectively with Leicestershire and Worcestershire 25 years earlier.

The counties of Wales and Scotland were radically reorganised in the 1970s, giving way in the latter case to a reduced number of regions. These and the eight reorganised counties of Wales were in turn abolished in 1996 in favour of smaller unitary authorities, a system similar to that proposed for the whole of Great Britain in the 1960s.

The term county is also used in many states of the United States for the level of local government below the state itself.

The historical counties of France were abolished in 1790 and incorporated in the new départements created following the Revolution.