developed country

developed country (plural developed countries)

1. (economics) A high-income country with an advanced, industrialized economy.

   Antonyms: LMIC, developing country

   Hypernym: country

   Near-synonym: HIC

   • 2023 October 4, Sir Michael Holden, “Comment: High noon for Sunak”, in RAIL, number 993, page 3:

     We can't imagine what life would be like without all of these critical pieces of the nation's infrastructure. Without them, both economic growth and personal mobility would have been grievously affected, and the UK would be condemned to slide down towards "less developed country" status.

Although the terms developed country and developing country remain in wide use as of 2025, some style guides (for example, the AMA Manual of Style in its 11th edition) deprecate them because they imply a false dichotomy, when development is in reality a never-ending/always-changing spectrum of ongoing effort and degrees of attainment; for example, none of the G7 countries has finished its development (as the participial adjective developed suggests). Some style guides discourage their use in favor of less biased terms such as "high-income countries" and "low- and middle-income countries".^[1][2]

• “developed country”, in Cambridge English Dictionary, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, 1999–present.
• OECD Glossary of Statistical Terms. See "Developed, developing countries" entries (p. 138)