215 words
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The shortest answer is zero…naught, none, zilch! Because “Xanadu” is a fictional place—an imaginary vision of an idyllic heaven concocted by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his poem Kublai Khan✵ with the aid of a dose of laudanum—and this furphy aside, there is no real country in the world with an exonym starting with the initial “X”.
There are, at last count by the number-crunchers at the UN, some 195 countries in the world, give or take a couple. Lots of them start with the letters “A”, “B”, “C”, “E”, “G”, “I”, “L”, “M”, “N”, “P”, “S§”, “T” and “U”. “D”, “F”, “H”, “J”, “K” and “R” are less common but still get their quota up. The rest of the alphabet accounts for very few countries. Let’s identify these rare birds:
“Z” did have a third entry for a while, Zaire, but this Central African state got renamed (insert straight face here) the “Democratic Republic of Congo” in 1997 😊
Twenty-five majuscules accounted for…this leaves, quite surprisingly, the letter “W”, which like “X”, not a single country’s name starts with.
✵ Coleridge was actually thinking about the real Chinese city of Shangdu in Inner Mongolia
§ by a considerable distance numero uno in the countries list, “S” is the first letter for a whopping 26 country names
