Countries of the World Quiz

Common older names are accepted, so Ivory Coast, Czech Republic, Turkey and Swaziland all count, and one small typo is forgiven on longer names. Kyrgyzstan will not cost you a point over a single slip.

A method for all 195

Typing whatever comes to mind gets most people a good way and then stops dead. A fixed route around the map is what gets you the rest, because every country you type reminds you of the one next to it.

1. Europe in bands, west to east: Iberia, France and the Low Countries, the Alps, the Balkans, then the Baltic and the Nordic countries. Do the small states as a separate set at the end: Andorra, Monaco, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Vatican City, Malta, Luxembourg.
2. Africa: go around the coast clockwise from Morocco, then fill in the landlocked interior: Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini.
3. Asia: the Middle East and the Gulf, then the Central Asian group (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan), then South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia.
4. The Americas: Canada down through Central America to Panama, then the Caribbean islands, then South America clockwise from Colombia.
5. Oceania last, and slowly. Australia and New Zealand come easily; the Pacific island states are where attempts tend to stall: Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Samoa, Tonga, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Nauru, Palau, Marshall Islands, Micronesia.

The ones that go missing

Countries that sit inside another one are easy to forget because they never come up as a neighbor on the way past: Lesotho, entirely surrounded by South Africa, and San Marino and Vatican City, both inside Italy.

Then there are the names that sound like one country but are two or three: Niger and Nigeria, Sudan and South Sudan, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Equatorial Guinea, the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominica and the Dominican Republic. Type every member of the group as soon as you think of one of them.

What counts as a country here

The list is the 193 UN member states plus the two UN observer states. Taiwan, Kosovo, Western Sahara, Greenland and Puerto Rico are in an optional other territories setting and are not part of the standard 195. The reasoning is set out in the borders and names policy. Names are the current official ones, so the map says Türkiye, Czechia, Eswatini and Côte d'Ivoire.

Where to go next

Typing a name is not the same as knowing where it is. The world map quiz names each country and asks you to click it, and the world capitals quiz adds capitals. For pencil practice, the blank world map comes in a numbered version with an answer key.

Teachers can run this as a whole-class count on a projector: the room calls out names, one person types, and the red countries left at the end make the homework list.

All the countries and capitals in this quiz

The 193 UN member states and the 2 UN observer states (Vatican City and Palestine). Borders and names policy.

Names and capitals: CIA World Factbook (final edition), checked against Wikidata and Natural Earth. Flags: flag-icons, each checked against Wikimedia Commons. See sources. Spotted a mistake? Tell us.