A hundred was an administrative division which was geographically part of a larger region; it was formerly used in England, Wales, South Australia, some parts of the United States, Denmark, Southern Schleswig, Sweden, Finland, Estonia and Norway.

Other terms for the hundred in English and other languages include wapentake, herred (Danish, Norwegian Bokmål), herad (Norwegian Nynorsk), hérað (Icelandic), härad or hundare (Swedish), Harde (German), Satakunta or kihlakunta (Finnish) and kihelkond (Estonian).

In Ireland a similar subdivision of counties is referred to as a barony, and a hundred is a subdivision of a particularly large townland (most townlands are not divided into hundreds).

Etymology

The name "hundred" may be derived from the number one hundred; it may once have referred to an area liable to provide a hundred men under arms, or containing roughly a hundred homesteads. It was a traditional Germanic system described as early as AD 98 by Tacitus (the centeni). Similar systems were used in the traditional administrative regimes of China and Japan.