Somehow we ended up in my bathroom again for another English lesson. So several
country names have the word 'the' with them. We have The United Kingdom, which which is
short for 'The United Kingdom on Great Britain and Northern Ireland' but we usually have the 'The UK'.
We have 'The United States'. We also have 'The Netherlands'.
We have 'The Bahamas' and finally we have 'The Gambia' all the way over here.
Now those are all the country names that officially have 'the'. But there are a
few more countries where we often add 'the'. For example, 'The Philippines'
and 'The Maldives'. Maldives
Philippines Now, why do we say 'the' with those countries?
It's probably related to the fact that it's a collection of islands. Having said that, we
don't say 'The Indoonesia', even though Indonesia is also a country made up of a bunch of islands.