Argentina is a South American country, constituted as a federation of twenty-three provinces and an autonomous city. It is second in size on the South American continent to Brazil and eighth in the world. Argentina occupies a continental surface area of 2,766,890 km² (1,068,302 sq mi) between the Andes mountain range in the west and the southern Atlantic Ocean in the east and south. It is bordered by Paraguay and Bolivia in the north, Brazil and Uruguay in the northeast, and Chile in the west and south. The country claims the British-administered overseas territories of the Falkland Islands and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. Argentina also claims 969,464 km² (374,312 sq mi) of Antarctica, known as Argentine Antarctica, overlapping other claims made by Chile and the United Kingdom (British Antarctic Territory).
The name Argentina (from Latin argentum: silver) was first used extensively in the 1612 book Historia del descubrimiento, población, y conquista del Río de la Plata (History of the discovery, population, and conquest of the Río de la Plata) by Ruy Díaz de Guzmán, naming the territory Tierra Argentina (Land of Silver).
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