Flag quiz

Every round apart from the daily one is dealt in a random order from the browser's own random source, and no flag comes up twice. In the multiple choice modes the right answer sits at a random place among three wrong ones. A right answer moves on by itself after 0.9 seconds. After a wrong one, the right answer stays on screen until Next flag is pressed, so the miss can be looked at.

• "Name the flag: four names" shows the flag above four country names, and a tap or the keys 1 to 4 pick one.
• "Name the flag: type it" asks you to type the answer in the box and press Check or Enter. Skip gives the flag up, which counts as a miss.
• "Find the flag: four flags" shows a country's name above four flags, and the task is to find the flag that belongs to it.

A round runs the same way in every mode, with no account or download. The settings under the board pick the set of flags, the mode, the level and the round. A round holds 10 or 20 flags per player or every flag in the set, and Today's ten is the daily round. The level matters only when there are answers to pick from. The easy level never offers a flag that the quiz groups with the right one, while the hard level puts the look-alike groups first. The clock counts up from the first flag and sets no time limit, so the timer only records the time taken. At the end, the result shows the score as right answers out of flags asked, and the time. It adds the longest run of right answers in a row and a row of green and red squares in the order played. Every missed flag is listed with the answer that was given.

The number depends on what counts as a country, so this quiz fixes its own set of 195 flags. They belong to the 193 member states on the United Nations' list and to the 2 non-member observer states it also names.

The UN's member list prints no total, but it has 193 entries, each with a date of admission; the latest is South Sudan, admitted on 14 July 2011. Its list of non-member states gives the Holy See and the State of Palestine a standing invitation to take part as observers. General Assembly resolution 67/19 of 29 November 2012 gave Palestine non-member observer State status.

In the quiz the two observers appear as Vatican City and Palestine, the short names the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) uses. Other flag lists give 194, 196, 197 or 254, depending on how they treat the observers and whether they add Kosovo, Taiwan or territories. Kosovo is on the FCDO's list of names, yet it is not a UN member, so it falls outside this set.

The size of the set says nothing about which places are sovereign states. It only follows the UN's own two lists, which gives a fixed answer that anyone can check.

Africa gives the largest regional set, 54 flags, and Oceania the smallest, 14. The regions follow UN M49, the UN Statistics Division's standard of country and area codes for statistical use. A region comes close to a continent, but its borders are not always the same.

The extra flag in Asia belongs to Palestine, and the one in Europe to Vatican City. The Americas form a single region in M49, with no separate North or South America. Among the quiz's states, its sub-region Northern America holds only Canada and the United States, and every other state of the Americas sits in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Some borders differ from a school atlas. M49 places Cyprus, Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Israel in Western Asia, Kazakhstan in Central Asia, Russia in Eastern Europe and Egypt in Northern Africa. A Europe round therefore never asks for Turkey or Cyprus, and there is no Middle East set, because M49 has no such region.

The names follow the FCDO's "Geographical names and information", which says that "All UK government departments and other public bodies must use the approved country and territory names". The Permanent Committee on Geographical Names (PCGN) gives the same short names for all 195 states in its "Country names" list.

Several of those British forms differ from other lists: Ivory Coast, East Timor, Turkey, The Bahamas, The Gambia, and Sao Tome and Principe without accents. The UN's member list, by contrast, writes Türkiye. The PCGN's timeline of name changes records that in 2026 the Republic of Nauru became the Republic of Naoero, and the UN list now shows Naoero too.

When typing, the quiz also accepts other names for the same country, so an older or longer form still counts.

• Former names: Burma, Swaziland, Macedonia and Nauru.
• Short and everyday forms: UK, USA, Holland, UAE, DRC and PNG.
• Other official spellings: Côte d'Ivoire, Timor-Leste, Türkiye, Czech Republic and Holy See.

Britain and Great Britain count for the United Kingdom too, even though Great Britain strictly leaves out Northern Ireland. England, Scotland and Wales never count, because each is one part of the UK, not the state whose flag is shown.

Capital letters, accents, punctuation and a leading "the" make no difference, so "gambia" and "The Gambia" both count. Names of up to 4 letters must be exact, which keeps "Irak" from reading as Iraq. Up to 9 letters, one typo is forgiven, and longer names allow two.

A typo is a wrong, missing or extra letter, or two neighbouring letters swapped, and it counts only when no other country is as close. "Austrlia" sits one letter away from both Australia and Austria, so it reads as neither and scores as wrong. A forgiven typo shows which country was read: "Columbia" gives "Right, read as: Colombia".

Many do, and the quiz keeps 25 groups of flags that share a layout in the same or nearly the same colours. Chad, Romania, Andorra and Moldova, for instance, all show blue, yellow and red vertical stripes.

On the hard level, the three wrong answers come from the flag's own look-alikes first, then from states in the same M49 region, then from anywhere. The easy level draws all three from anywhere and never offers one of the flag's look-alikes. The groups are this site's own, made by comparing the images.

• Red over white, or white over red: Indonesia, Monaco and Poland.
• Red, white and blue horizontal stripes: Netherlands, Luxembourg and Paraguay.
• Yellow, blue and red horizontal stripes: Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela.
• The Union Flag in the canton of a blue field: Australia, New Zealand, Tuvalu and Fiji.
• The Nordic cross, set off the centre towards the flagpole: Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Sweden and Finland.
• The Pan-Arab colours, with a triangle or band at the flagpole: Jordan, Palestine, Sudan, Kuwait and United Arab Emirates.
• A white crescent and star on red: Turkey and Tunisia.

For one tricolour, a constitution names the colours. In the Irish Statute Book's text of Bunreacht na hÉireann, the Constitution of Ireland, Article 7 reads "The national flag is the tricolour of green, white and orange". In the images, Ivory Coast shows the same colours the other way round, with orange nearest the flagpole. Italy and Mexico share the layout in green, white and red.

Where two flags differ only by a shade, the eye does the same work as in spot the different colour, where one tile hides in a slightly different shade.

Almost every national flag is wider than it is tall, yet two in the quiz have another shape set by law. The Constitution of Nepal, published by the Nepal Law Commission, describes the flag in Article 8(1) as "two juxtaposed triangular figures with a crimson-coloured base and deep blue borders".

Among these 195 flags, Nepal's is the only one that is not a rectangle. Switzerland's federal law protecting its coat of arms, the Wappenschutzgesetz published on Fedlex, says in Article 3 that the Swiss flag shows a Swiss cross in a square field.

In the quiz, each image comes from the flag-icons set and is drawn at one shape, 4:3. The Swiss flag therefore shows as a rectangle, and Nepal's two triangles sit inside the frame with space around them. Every frame has the same shape, so apart from Nepal's pennant, the outline of a flag gives nothing away.

Nor does any Act of Parliament fix the proportions of the UK's own flag, as the next section explains.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) calls it the Union Flag. Its guidance describes it as "the national flag of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Crown Dependencies and the Overseas Territories". Union Jack is the familiar name for the same flag, which the quiz shows for the UK.

The DCMS guidance adds that the first Union Flag was created in 1606 and combined the flags of England and Scotland, while the present one dates from 1801.

Its design comes from a royal proclamation of 1 January 1801, printed in The London Gazette, issue 15324. The proclamation reads: "the Union Flag shall be Azure, the Crosses Saltires of St. Andrew and St. Patrick ... surmounted by the Cross of St. George". In plain words, a blue field carries the saltire of St Andrew and the saltire of St Patrick under the cross of St George. The flag rests on that proclamation rather than on an Act of Parliament, and the text sets no proportions.

DCMS encourages UK government buildings to fly the flag all year round and lists designated days for it. The 2026 list includes St David's Day on 1 March, St Patrick's Day on 17 March, St George's Day on 23 April and St Andrew's Day on 30 November.

England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland do not appear as separate flags here, since the set holds UN states only. The proclamation names no Welsh emblem, and no dragon appears on the flag. A dragon does turn up among the quiz's flags, on that of Bhutan.

Up to 4 players can share one phone, tablet or computer, answering flag by flag in turn. With two or more, a line above each flag names whose turn it is, such as "Turn: Player 2".

Each player gets the round length chosen, or fewer when the set cannot give everyone that many without a repeat. With every flag in the set, the set is split evenly and leftover flags stay out: three players in Oceania get 4 flags each and 2 are never asked. Four players sharing all 195 get 48 each, with 3 left out. The result names the winner, or every player tied for first, with each player's score.

Today's ten is one set of 10 flags, the same for everyone who plays that day, whatever the mode and level. Where there are answers to pick, they match for everyone on the same mode and level. The day comes from the device's own calendar. The round always covers the world for one player, so the region and the number of players are locked while it is chosen.

Copy result puts a line with the score and the row of squares on the clipboard, followed by the link, ready to share your result in a message. The link also keeps the settings, so a friend who opens it gets the same set, mode, level, round and number of players.

Bests count only for one player and complete rounds. The quiz keeps one for each set, mode, level and round length. It also keeps the best daily round of each day and the last 10 rounds, all in this browser's local storage.

For a party round in which one player guesses and the others give clues, the forehead guessing game also runs from a single phone.

The study panel lists every flag of the chosen set with its name, from A to Z, and its search box finds a country by any accepted name. The world set shows all 195 flags of the world with their names, and a region narrows it to between 14 and 54.

After a round, Practise the missed flags starts a new round of only the flags that were missed, in a new order. It never counts as a best, so a practice run cannot replace a real score.

The print sheet takes the flags of the chosen set and round length (today's ten when that round is chosen), in a new random order. Each flag has a line under it for the country, and the answers follow on a second page. That makes a printable flags of the world quiz for a classroom, a club or a long journey.

Even in a region round, the easy level draws its wrong answers from anywhere on the map. The hard level keeps them close: look-alikes first, then states from the same region.