Egypt  is a country mainly  in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming  a land bridge  in Western Asia. Covering  an area of about 1,010,000  square kilometers  (390,000 sq mi), Egypt borders the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Gaza Strip and Israel to the northeast, the Red Sea to the east, Sudan to the south and Libya to the west.Egypt is one of the most populous countries in Africa and the Middle East. The great majority of its estimated 75 million live near the banks of the Nile River, in an area of about 40,000 square kilometers (15,000 sq mile).One of the ancient Egyptian names of the country, Kemet (from kem "black"),is derived from the fertile black soils deposited by the Nile floods.

The name is realized as kīmi and kīməin the Coptic stage of the Egyptian language, and appeared in early Greek  as Χημία (Khēmía). The English  name "Egypt" came via the Latin word  Aegyptus  derived from the ancient  Greek  word  Aígyptos . The  adjective  aigýpti, aigýptios  was  borrowed  into Coptic as gyptios, kyptios, and  from there  into Arabic  as qubṭī, back formed into qubṭ, whence English Copt. The term is derived  from Late  Egyptian  Hikuptah "Memphis", a corruption of the earlier Egyptian name Hat-ka-Ptah , meaning  "home of the ka (soul) of Ptah",  the name  of a  temple  to the  god Ptah  at  Memphis. Strabo provided a folk etymology according to which Aígyptos had evolved as a compound from Aigaiou huptiōs , meaning  "below the Aegean".At 1,001,450 square kilometers (386,660 sq mi), Egypt is the world's 38th-largest  country. In terms of land area, it is approximately the same size as all of Central America, twice the size of France, four times the size of the United Kingdom, and the combined size of the US states of Texas and California.