Near East

Near East: see Middle East.

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Middle East

 or Mideast or Near East

Geographic region where Europe, Africa, and Asia meet. It is an unofficial and imprecise term that now generally encompasses the lands around the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea—notably Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, and Syria—as well as Iran, Iraq, and the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. Afghanistan, Libya, Turkey, and The Sudan are sometimes also included. The term was formerly used by Western geographers and historians to describe the region from the Persian Gulf to Southeast Asia; Near East is sometimes used to describe the same area.

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Near East

1. another term for the Middle East

2. (formerly) the Balkan States and the area of the Ottoman Empire

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Near East 

the name of the territory in western Asia and northeast Africa containing the Arab Republic of Egypt, Sudan, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Libya, Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Yemen Arab Republic, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, the Bahrain Islands in the Persian Gulf, and the Republic of Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea. In foreign literature, mainly western European and American, the countries of the Near East together with Iran and Afghanistan constitute the Middle East. In the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the term “Near East” referred to the entire territory of the Ottoman Empire, including the countries of the Balkan Peninsula.