Shire
traditional term for a division of land, found in some English-speaking countries
Shire () is a traditional term for an administrative division of land in Great Britain and some other English-speaking and Commonwealth countries. It is generally synonymous with county (such as Berkshire and Cheshire). English counties are among the oldest extant national divisions in the world.
It was first used in Wessex from the beginning of Anglo-Saxon settlement, and spread to most of the rest of England in the 10th century. Today, 23 counties bear the "-shire" suffix in England, 23 in Scotland, and 10 in Wales.
In some rural and regional parts of Australia, including parts of the state of Victoria, a shire is a local government area; however, in Australia, shire is not synonymous with "county", the latter term being used to describe a particular lands administrative division in some sparsely populated parts of Western Australia and the Northern Territory.
Etymology
The word shire derives from the Old English sċir, from the Proto-Germanic *skizo (cf. Old High German: scira), denoting an 'official charge' a 'district under a governor', and a 'care'. In the UK, shire became synonymous with county, an administrative term introduced to England through the Norman Conquest in the later part of the eleventh century. In contemporary British usage, the word counties also refers to shires, mainly in places such as Shire Hall.
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This entry incorporates text from “Shire” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.