A country in the south-west corner of the Arabian Peninsula, at the bottom of the Arabian Peninsula, with Saudi Arabia to the north and Oman to the east. Its capital is Sana'a, one of the oldest continuously lived-in cities in the world. The name in English covers a state that has changed shape more than once: for most of the twentieth century there were two Yemens, North Yemen and South Yemen, which joined into one country in 1990. So when you read older books, 'Yemen' may mean only half of what it means now. In news English today the word usually comes attached to war, hunger, and the port of Aden, because a civil war that began in 2014 has kept the country in the headlines; a student who only meets the word in news reports can end up thinking 'Yemen' is the name of a problem rather than a place. It is also, historically, a coffee country — the port of Mocha (Yemeni: al-Mukha) is where the coffee word 'mocha' comes from, and Yemeni coffee is still sold at high prices. Written with a capital Y, never with 'the' in front of it: we say 'in Yemen', not 'in the Yemen' (though you may see 'the Yemen' in older British writing, the way people once wrote 'the Ukraine' — it sounds dated now). The word for a person or thing from there is Yemeni.