Netherlands

1. 1
   proper noununcountable

   The main constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located primarily in Western Europe and bordering Germany and Belgium, with Amsterdam as its capital and largest city.

   The Netherlands borders both Germany and Belgium along its eastern and southern edges.

   Dutch growers shipped record volumes of flowers from the Netherlands last spring.

   SimilarHolland

   Note

   This is the Netherlands as one European state among others. When Bryony Jones lists the six founding nations of the ECSC for CNN in 2012, it stands beside France, Belgium and Luxembourg in exactly this sense. Even this narrower country is not wholly European, since it lies mainly but not entirely in Western Europe. Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten belong only to the wider kingdom.

2. 2
   proper noununcountable

   The sovereign kingdom in Western Europe composed of four constituent countries, including Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten in the Caribbean.

   Beyond its European heartland, the Netherlands as a kingdom extends across three Caribbean nations.

   In its full constitutional sense, the Netherlands unites four self-governing countries under one crown.

   Note

   The name describes the land itself. It joins nether, meaning "lower," with lands, because much of the country lies below sea level. English may have copied Dutch Nederland, or it may have formed the same name on its own. The name is plural in form and keeps its article: the Netherlands. In this widest sense it covers the whole kingdom, Caribbean islands included, not only the European country.

3. 3
   proper nounrarehistoricaluncountable

   The Low Countries, the low-lying region of Western Europe that takes in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

   Spanish armies marched across the Netherlands during the wars of the sixteenth century.

   Cloth merchants of the Netherlands grew wealthy from trade along the delta's rivers.

   Note

   An older and wider Netherlands, now rare outside historical writing, means the whole low delta country of the Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt. Read older texts carefully: there, "the Netherlands" may take in what is now Belgium and Luxembourg. In modern prose, the Low Countries says the same thing without being mistaken for the present-day country.

4. 4
   nounslangcountableplural

   Alternative letter-case form of netherlands.

   He doubled over after a stray elbow caught him in the Netherlands.

   She joked that the rough tackle had nearly destroyed his Netherlands.

   Similargroin, crotch

   Note

   Here slang borrows the country's capital letter for a joke about the body. In lowercase, the netherlands are the hindquarters or the crotch, and capitalizing the word turns that euphemism into a pun on the map. The joke rests on the same nether, "lower," that sits behind the country's name. The word is plural-only and jocular, so keep it out of contexts where the place could be meant.

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