A shire county or non-metropolitan county in England, is an administrative county which is not a metropolitan county.
Most of the shire counties end in the suffix "-shire", but not all of them; for example, Kent is a shire county.
The term is sometimes used in a restricted sense to refer only to the administrative counties that have a two-tier structure, of a county council and district councils. It therefore excludes the various unitary authorities, including the Isle of Wight, Herefordshire, Rutland, the whole of Berkshire and parts of many other counties.
The term "shire county" is a tautology, the word county coming from French and shire from Saxon.
