4? How did you get 4? You only need to change 2 and add/substract one. That would make 3, still not a candidate for this quiz but not as big a difference as you suggest
Yeah I think that how much two countries names are similar should be measured by percent, rather than number of letters that need to be changed/added. If you had two hypothetical countries, called 'Bo' and 'Fa', they would end up on this list having only two letters needed to be changed, but really the words would have no letters in common at all. The percent based scale also values longer countries, as having 6 of your 9 letters align (three letters off) would be the same as having 2 out of 3 letters aligning (one letter off).
In Austria, you said to add two. But in Australia, there is no I between r and a in Australia. So you have to remove the I and add 3. The word now would become Austriali, while removing the i and adding an a at the end would be Australia. Fix it plz.
Unrelated, and probably known by the geo-aces here, but there's a fun wordplay with Sweden and Denmark when they play football. Only the first three letters of each name is shown next to the score, so it looks like this at the start of the game:
If it was based on % then it might well throw up oddities like United Kingdom & Turkmenistan...
Change 1, Add 1 in this order (as for Gambia)
I don't know if I'm right but I assumed you made the transformation in order.
2. spelling
3. (It goes on from here. There's a whole list.)
Romania could also be paired with Albania
SWE 0 - 0 DEN
The letters missing from each country's name are:
DEN & MARK
Clearly not as 🤯 as I thought!
Funny that they're all European(ish) counties...
Namibia (subtract 1, change 1)