Noun

states

1. Plural form of state.

State commonly refers to either the present status of a system or entity, or to a governed entity or sub-entity, such as a nation or province.

Political entities

• Sovereign state, a sovereign political entity in international public law
• Federated state, a political entity forming part of a federal sovereign state (includes a list)
• State (polity), the state in sociology and political science
• Nation state, a state which coincides with a nation.
• Rechtsstaat, the legal state (constitutional state, state subordinated to law) in philosophy of law and as principle of many national constitutions

Physical science

• State (physics) (list of 8 definitions), particularly in thermodynamics, statistical physics, and dynamical systems and chaos theory
• Thermodynamic state, a set of physical quantities describing variable properties of a given thermodynamic system
• State of matter, solid, liquid or vapour phases of matter
• Chemical state, the electronic, chemical and physical nature of an element
• Quantum state, in physics, the state of a quantum mechanical system given by a vector in the underlying Hilbert space