Vietnam is a country in Southeast Asia. It is long and thin, curving down the east side of the mainland, with China to the north and Laos and Cambodia to the west, and a very long coast on the sea. About 92 million people lived there in 2014, and more now. The capital is Hanoi, in the north; Ho Chi Minh City (which many people still call Saigon) is the biggest city, in the south. France ruled Vietnam from the middle of the 1800s as part of French Indochina. In 1954 it became independent, but split in two: South Vietnam, backed by the United States and the west, and North Vietnam, which was Communist. The fight to join the two halves became the Vietnam War, and in 1975 the north won and the country became one again. In English you will often meet the word not as the country but as a short way of pointing at that war: 'He served in Vietnam', 'my grandfather never talked about Vietnam'. Americans especially use it that way, and sometimes even more loosely, to mean any long war a country cannot get out of — 'this could become another Vietnam'. That use is a little dated now, and younger speakers use it less. You will see it written Vietnam, Viet Nam, and older books say Viet-Nam; Vietnam is the normal modern spelling. The word for a person or the language is Vietnamese.