I thought the same thing, by what standards would the UK be considered _large?_ I'm from the states, though, so I tend to think of most European countries as small.

By world standards it's not large, but among its immediate neighbours it's one of the largest countries: third by population in the EU and one of the larger by area.

I'd think places like Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, or even Austria would get called little much before UK, to say nothing of the smaller countries like Iceland or Luxembourg. I don't think many people in the UK would describe it as little either.

Is this an intellectual exercise? Hmmm, how about large when consider by Economic Efficiency (as measured by output / land use)?

GDP / Land mass.

  UK: ~8,780,428 (  2,139,000,000,000 /   243,610 ) [1]
  US: ~1,450,745 ( 14,256,000,000,000 / 9,826,675 ) [2]

Both end up being considered massive in comparison to my "piddly" little country:

        ~111,732 (    851,170,000,000 / 7,617,930 ) [3]

[1] UK 2009 PPP GDP estimate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom

[2] US 2010 PPP GDP estimate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States

[3] AUS 2009 PPP GDP estimate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia