Flag identifier

Every flag carries tags read from its image: its colours, its layout, its stripes in order, its symbols and the number of stars. Each detail picked becomes a test. A flag scores one for a test it passes, half for a near miss and nothing for a fail. Flags that pass every test come first; those that miss one detail, or two by half, follow as close matches, each with what differs.

The colours come from a palette of 9: red, maroon, orange, yellow or gold, green, light blue, blue, white and black. Gold counts as yellow, saffron as orange and crimson as red. A colour button cycles: one tap puts the colour in the flag, a second rules it out, a third clears it. "No other colours" counts any other colour against a flag. "Colour covering most of the flag" keeps flags where one colour covers more than 55% of the image.

Colours that are easy to mix up count half. Maroon stands in for red, orange for red or yellow, and light blue for blue, in either direction. There are 12 layouts and 14 symbols to pick, any number at once. Stars count like colours: one star more or fewer than the number chosen is half a match, because stars are easy to miscount at a glance.

In short, the identifier works by elimination. A flag seen in passing is described as memory keeps it: colours, stripes across or down, a cross, a star or an animal. Each detail is checked against every national flag in the set, and only the flags meeting all of them are listed first. Below them come close matches, which miss a single detail or come near on two, so a colour misremembered does not lose the right flag. Results run from the best score down, simpler flags first among equals, then A to Z. A tap on any flag opens its details and the 6 flags most like it.

Results come 24 at a time, with "Show more" for the rest. With nothing chosen, a button lists all 195 flags from A to Z. The name box takes a country's name, including accepted alternatives such as Holland, or a pasted flag emoji. The checked cases further down take official descriptions, such as the Royal Household's account of the three crosses, and show the identifier returns exactly that flag.

A white flag with a red cross, white covering most of it, points to Georgia among the states and to the St George's Cross of England. A crescent moon with a star fits 12 state flags, and one star on a plain field fits 5. Each row below is a description the identifier was given, with every state whose flag meets all of it.

Small details change the answer a lot. Red, white and a cross, with no other detail, returns 10 states, among them Denmark, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Adding "No other colours" and the main colour leaves Georgia alone. The Nordic cross is a cross whose upright is set towards the pole; the identifier treats it as a cross as well, so either choice finds those flags.

Stripes have two extra choices once picked: how many there are, and the colour of the first. That is the top stripe when they run across and the one at the pole when they run down. Three stripes across in blue, red and white, with red on top, return Croatia, Laos, Netherlands, Paraguay and Serbia. With white on top they return Russia, Slovakia and Slovenia.

Red is on 149 of the 195 state flags and white on 140, far ahead of the rest; maroon is the rarest, on 3. The shares in the last column are measured on each 4:3 image, not taken from any official figure.

Red with white and blue is the colour set more state flags use than any other. Exactly 28 have those three colours and nothing else, 18 of them in stripes across. France is the only one with vertical stripes in just those colours. Ticking "No other colours" is what separates these flags from the many that add a fourth colour.

A tricolour is a flag of three stripes in three colours, and the stripes' direction is often the deciding detail. Ireland and Ivory Coast share the same three colours in vertical stripes, in opposite orders. Ireland runs green, white and orange from the pole, Ivory Coast orange, white and green. In horizontal stripes the same colours give Niger.

Green, yellow and red, often called the Pan-African colours, make up 11 flags with no other colour, and red, white, green and black 10. Each family below is split by the way its stripes run.

Stars are the commonest symbol, on 63 of the 195 state flags, ahead of arms or an emblem on 35. A further 64 flags carry no symbol at all, which the "No symbol" choice finds. A symbol counts when it is clearly visible at the flag's normal size, also inside a coat of arms, such as the eagle on the flag of Mexico.

Exactly one star is by far the most frequent count, on 1 flags, and the United States has the most, 50. Only stars drawn on their own are counted; stars inside arms or a seal are not. A star counts whatever its points, so a five-pointed star and a seven-pointed one are both just a star.

Official texts explain several of these counts. Section 1 of title 4 of the United States Code still speaks of "thirteen horizontal stripes" and a union of "forty-eight stars". Section 2 adds a star for each new state on the 4 July after its admission, and the image shows 50. Brazil shows 27 stars, one per state and the Federal District, as the annex of its flag law, Lei 5.700 of 1971, draws them.

That Brazilian law sets the sky as seen over Rio de Janeiro on 15 November 1889 and has the motto "Ordem e Progresso" written in green. The Government of the Commonwealth of Dominica describes "a circular emblem of red bearing a Sisserou Parrot" and says its "ten lime green stars" stand for the ten parishes. Animals are one button, so a parrot, an eagle, a lion or a dragon is found the same way.

The Constitution of the Kingdom of Bhutan explains the flag's dragon: "The white dragon symbolizes the undefiled thoughts of the people". Article 3 of the Basic Law of Governance of Saudi Arabia puts the shahada on green, "inscribed in the center with a drawn sword under it". The constitution of Mozambique, in article 297, describes a book with a gun and a hoe crossed over it, standing for study, production and defence.

Plants are one button too. Canadian Heritage records that the maple leaf flag was made official by a proclamation of Queen Elizabeth II on 28 January 1965 and inaugurated on 15 February 1965. Article 5 of the Lebanese Constitution puts "a green Cedar tree" in the white stripe. The Cyprus Press and Information Office describes "a copper-coloured (pantone 1385 C) silhouette of the map of Cyprus", the only map among the 195.

Small heraldic details are left untagged. The lions in the arms on the flag of Spain do not make it an animal flag, while a crown or a building that stands out does count.

The Union Flag appears on 5 of the 195 state flags: the United Kingdom's own, and 4 that carry it in the canton, the top corner by the pole. One symbol button finds all of them at once.

The Royal Household describes the flag as a union of three crosses. St George's Cross is "a red cross on a white ground". St Andrew's Cross is "a diagonal white cross on a blue ground". St Patrick's Cross, "a diagonal red cross on a white ground", came with the union of 1 January 1801. As the Royal Household notes, "The Welsh dragon does not appear on the Union Flag."

No statute sets the flag, as the Flag Institute's guide "Flying Flags in the United Kingdom" explains. "There is no Flag Act in UK law and the Union Flag is the national flag by long established custom and practice", it says. It also says "the broad white diagonal should be uppermost in the top-left corner". The identifier tags the flag as a cross and a diagonal cross, or saltire, in blue, red and white.

The Flags Amendment Act 1981 of Australia describes "the Union Jack occupying the upper quarter next the staff". It adds a large white star for the States and Territories and "5 white stars (representing the Southern Cross)". The identifier counts 6 stars on that flag, 4 on New Zealand's and 9 on Tuvalu's; Fiji has an emblem instead.

The New Zealand flag stayed after two referendums. The New Zealand Gazette's declaration of the second result, in 2016, gives 1,208,702 votes for the current flag and 921,876 for the Silver Fern Flag. The flag quiz puts these four canton flags in one group of flags often mistaken for each other.

England, Scotland and Wales have flags of their own, and the identifier includes all 3. They appear under "Not a state", never counted among the 195 and never among the close matches, because they are home nations of the United Kingdom, not states. The same guide from the Flag Institute names the national flags as "the Union Flag and the flags of England, Scotland and Wales".

England's flag is the red cross of St George on its own. Its tags here match those of the flag of Georgia, so the two come up together, and "Flags that look alike" rates them 100% alike. Scotland's Saltire is St Andrew's white diagonal cross on blue. Blue and white only with a saltire fits no state at all, so Scotland appears alone under "Not a state".

The Flag Institute's UK Flag Registry describes the flag of Wales as "a large red dragon on a white and green background", adopted officially in February 1959. In Welsh it is Y Ddraig Goch, the red dragon. Red with an animal returns 13 states and Wales; adding white and green, "No other colours" and horizontal stripes leaves Wales alone.

Northern Ireland has no flag in the identifier, because it has no official flag of its own. The Union Flag, shown among the states as the United Kingdom's flag, covers it with the rest of the country.

In the identifier's tags, 4 pairs of state flags are exactly the same: Indonesia and Monaco, Nicaragua and El Salvador, Romania and Chad and Slovenia and Slovakia. The identifier cannot tell those apart, so both always come up together. Any difference lies in details it does not record, such as shades, proportions or the arms they carry.

The "Flags that look alike" view takes any of the 198 flags and lists the 12 most like it, each with a similarity percentage and what the two share. Similarity is the site's own measure, not an official one: colours weigh 30%, stripes 25%, layout 20%, symbols 15% and the main colour 10%.

Pairs in the flag quiz's look-alike groups are lifted to at least 85% and marked as often mistaken for each other. Stripes in reverse order still count for a lot: Poland is white and red from the top and Indonesia the other way round, 94% alike. The home nations take part here too, which is why England heads the list for Georgia.

Two-stripe flags show how far the first stripe goes. Red and white in 2 horizontal stripes returns Indonesia, Monaco, Poland and Singapore; with white on top only Poland is left.

The hoist is the half of a flag next to the pole, and the fly the half that flies free. The field is the background on which everything else sits. Flags are drawn with the hoist on the left, and every image in the identifier follows that.

Cambridge Dictionary defines a canton as "a part of a country's flag that is different from the rest of the flag, occupying the top left corner". It defines a saltire as "a diagonal X-shaped cross, for example on a flag". In the identifier a saltire is "Diagonal cross (saltire)". It differs from "Diagonal band or split", a single stripe from corner to corner or a flag divided that way, as Bhutan and Papua New Guinea are.

A fimbriation is a narrow edging line between two colours, and the identifier never counts it as a stripe. Kenya has 3 stripes, black, red and green, though thin white lines separate them. A border runs round the edge, and a band at the pole is a vertical band next to the hoist. A plain field is one colour with only symbols on it.

Vexillology, the study of flags, has a word for each of these parts. The identifier keeps to plain ones, and its "First stripe (top, or next to the pole)" choice reads every flag from the hoist.

The set is the 193 UN member states and the 2 non-member observer states, the Holy See and the State of Palestine, shown as Palestine and Vatican City. Names follow the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names' "Country names" list, so the identifier writes East Timor, Ivory Coast and Naoero. A flag emoji of a territory, such as Puerto Rico, brings a message that it is not one of the 195.

The tags are the site's own reading of the flag-icons 7.5.0 images, an open source set under the MIT licence, not an official description. A colour counts when it fills the field, a stripe, a band, a border, a cross or a triangle, or colours a symbol drawn on its own. Colours inside a coat of arms, a seal or a detailed emblem do not count.

The colour tags were checked by measuring how much of each image every colour covers. A test fails if a tagged colour is missing from the image or a large colour is untagged. No state flag has a single colour: the fewest any has is 2, on 46 flags, and the most is 6, on those of South Africa and South Sudan.

Every image is drawn at 4:3, so proportions do not show. Of the 195, 2 are square in their official form. For Switzerland that follows from article 3 of its Wappenschutzgesetz. For Vatican City, the official model annexed to the Fundamental Law of 31 July 2026 shows a square flag. Its article 24 describes a yellow field at the pole and a white one with the tiara and keys.

The description sits in the page link, so Copy link under the tool shares the same answer, and Print keeps it on paper. A name typed in the search box never enters the link, and nothing is stored. Picking a random state to look up is a job for the random country generator.