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In terms of population the most extreme example is the Pitcairn Islands, with ca. 47 inhabitants, although as a dependency of the United Kingdom it is not itself a sovereign state. The smallest fully sovereign microstate is generally accepted as being the Vatican City, with 911 inhabitants as of July 2003 and an area of only 0.44 sq km. The Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM) is an effectively non-territorial sovereign entity that might also be considered to be a microstate.

The term microstate is sometimes confused with the term micronation. The distinction is that the former are recognised as sovereign states whereas the latter are not.

See also: List of countries by population and List of countries by area.

Microstate is also used in thermodynamicsThermodynamics is the physics of energy, heat, work, entropy and the spontaneity of processes. Thermodynamics is closely related to statistical mechanics from which many thermodynamic relationships can be derived. While dealing with processes in which sys to refer to a specific configuration of particles of a material: see microstate (thermodynamics)In thermodynamics, a microstate describes a specific detailed microscopic configuration of a system. In contrast, the macrostate of a system refers to its macroscopic bulk properties such as its temperature and pressure. Large numbers of distinct microsta.