State most commonly refers to:
- State (polity), a centralized political organization that regulates law and society within a territory
- Sovereign state, a sovereign polity in international law, commonly referred to as a country
- Nation state, a state where the majority identify with a single nation (with shared culture or ethnic group)
- Constituent state, a political subdivision of a state
- Federated state, constituent states part of a federation
- State of nature, a concept within philosophy that describes the way humans acted before forming societies or civilizations
State may also refer to:
Music
Songs
- "The State", a 2011 song by Porter Robinson from Spitfire
- Rechtsstaat, the legal state (constitutional state, state subordinated to law) in the philosophy of law and as a principle of many national constitutions
- United States Department of State, a division of the executive branch of the United States federal government, dealing with foreign affairs; sometimes referred to as "State", for short, in American political jargon.
Federated states:
Constituent states:
The Estates or the States, a national assembly of the estates of the realm, an early form of legislature that was common throughout feudal Europe:
Computing
- State (computer science), a unique configuration of information in a program or machine
- Program state, in computer science, a snapshot of the measure of various conditions in the system
- State (website), semantic web platform created by London, UK-based Equal Media Ltd
- State pattern, in computer science, a behavioral design pattern
Physics and chemistry
- State, a complete description of a system in classical mechanics
- Chemical state, the electronic, chemical and physical nature of an element
- Quantum state, the state of a quantum mechanical system given by a vector in the underlying Hilbert space
- Stationary state, an eigenvector of a Hamiltonian
- State of matter, solid, liquid or gaseous phases of matter; describing the organization of matter in a phase
- Thermodynamic state, a set of physical quantities describing variable properties of a given thermodynamic system