• I. 1. a. A tract or expanse of land of undefined extent; a region, district.
• 2. a. A tract or district having more or less definite limits in relation to human occupation. e.g. owned by the same lord or proprietor, or inhabited by people of the same race, dialect, occupation, etc.; spec. preceded by a personal name: the region associated with a particular person or his works; also fig.
• 3. The territory or land of a nation; usually an independent state, or a region once independent and still distinct in race, language, institutions, or historical memories, as England, Scotland, and Ireland, in the United Kingdom, *etc.

  With political changes, what were originally distinct countries have become provinces or districts of one country, and vice versa; the modern tendency being to identify the term with the existing political condition.

• 4. The land of a person's birth, citizenship, residence, etc.; used alike in the wider sense of native land, and in the narrower one of the particular district to which a person belongs.
• 5. a. ‘The parts of a region distant from cities or courts’ (J.); the rural districts as distinct from the town or towns; sometimes applied to all outside the capital, called, by eminence, ‘town’.
• 6. a. The people of a district or state; the nation.

—Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, with online updates as of September 2008. Entry "1. country"