Flag Quiz — 50 Flags with Answers
5 rounds · 50 questions
Easy Flags
Picking up where you left off.
Which country does this flag belong to?
Final score
0 / 50
Round by round
- Easy Flags
- Flags of Europe
- Europe & Asia
- Africa & the Americas
- Hard Mode — Lookalikes
Show all 50 questions with answers and explanations
Every question, answer and explanation
Easy Flags
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Japan
The disc was for centuries placed slightly toward the hoist rather than dead center, so that it would look centered on a flag in motion. It was moved to the true middle only in 1999, when the design was written into law for the first time.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer France
The three bands were once deliberately unequal — roughly thirty, thirty-three and thirty-seven parts — because the outer edge of a flying flag appears narrower. They were evened out later, and in 2020 the blue was quietly changed to a darker shade.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Italy
The commonest confusion is not with Ireland but with Mexico, which uses the same three colors with an emblem. Against Ireland the giveaway is the third band: red rather than orange, and a shorter flag.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Germany
The colors are usually traced to the uniform of a volunteer corps in the Napoleonic wars — black coats with red facings and brass buttons. That makes them one of the few national colors taken from clothing rather than from heraldry.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer The United Kingdom
It combines three crosses and represents Wales in none of them, which is why proposals to redesign it come up periodically. It is also not symmetrical: there is a correct way up, decided by which white diagonal sits above the red at the top of the hoist.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Thailand
The current design dates from the First World War, and one account holds that blue was added to match the flags of the allies. The flag before it had an elephant on a plain red field.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Vietnam
The five points of the star stand for five groups in society — workers, peasants, soldiers, intellectuals and traders. Reading them off is a useful reminder that most stars on flags are counting something.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Switzerland
One of only two square national flags in the world, the other being Vatican City. The emblem of the Red Cross is this flag with the colors reversed, adopted in honor of the country where the organization was founded.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Sweden
The cross is offset toward the hoist rather than centered, which is the defining feature of the Nordic family of flags. All of them descend from the same design, which is why the group is recognizable before you can name any member.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Greece
The nine stripes are usually explained as the nine syllables of a phrase from the war of independence, though the flag was in use before that reading became standard. The corner cross marks a national church rather than a monarchy.
Flags of Europe
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer The Netherlands
It was originally orange, white and blue. The orange dye faded badly at sea and was hard to distinguish, so it drifted to red during the seventeenth century — but the orange survives in the pennant flown above the flag on the monarch's birthday.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Austria
One of the oldest designs still in use, traced by legend to a duke whose white tunic was soaked in blood except for the band beneath his belt. The story is medieval and unverifiable, which is true of most flag origin stories.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Hungary
Three horizontal bands that become the Italian flag when turned ninety degrees and recolored — a coincidence that makes both flags harder to recall than they should be. The green here is a darker shade than in most tricolors.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Poland
White above red. Reversing the two gives a different country's flag entirely, which is the single most common error people make with it — and the reversed version is used by two different states.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Ireland
The colors are meant as a statement rather than a decoration: green for one community, orange for the other, and white for the peace between them. Reversing the order produces the flag of a West African country instead.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Belgium
The bands are vertical, not horizontal, which is the usual mistake. It also has unusual proportions — taller relative to its width than nearly any other national flag.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Romania
Nearly identical to the flag of a country in central Africa, differing only in the exact shade of blue. The matter was raised at the United Nations in 2004 and neither country changed its design.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Finland
A Nordic cross in blue on white, the blue said to be the lakes and the white the snow. It was adopted in 1918, which makes it one of the younger members of a very old family of designs.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Denmark
Generally recognized as the oldest national flag still in use. The founding legend has it falling from the sky during a battle in 1219, and the country celebrates that date each year.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Norway
It contains, hidden within its bands, the flags of several other countries — including Thailand, the Netherlands, Poland, France, Finland and Indonesia — if you cut out the right rectangles. It is a well-known puzzle among flag enthusiasts.
Europe & Asia
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Russia
The design is generally traced to the Dutch flag, which its ruler admired while working in the shipyards there in the 1690s. The order of the bands differs, and there is no agreed meaning for the colors.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Ukraine
Two bands read as blue sky above yellow wheat, which makes it one of the few national flags that is a landscape rather than a symbol. It is upside down more often than most flags because either order looks plausible.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Bulgaria
White, green and red, and the green here means the country's farmland rather than any political movement. It is easily confused with the Hungarian flag, which uses the same three colors in a different order.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Lithuania
Yellow, green and red, adopted after independence in 1918 and restored in 1988 before the country's second independence was formally recognized. Flying it had been illegal for the fifty years in between.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Estonia
Blue, black and white, and the black band is unusual — very few national flags use it as a full stripe. It is read as the soil and the hardships of the past.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer The Czech Republic
It is the flag of the federation that split in 1993, kept by one half. The two states had agreed neither would use the old symbols, and this was the agreement's first casualty.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Iceland
A Nordic cross using the same three colors as its neighbor's flag but with the red and blue exchanged. The design was adopted while the country was still in union with Denmark, which had to approve it.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Indonesia
Red over white, and it is essentially identical to the flag of Monaco except for the proportions. Both countries claim precedence, and since neither will change, the difference remains a matter of shape.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Bangladesh
The disc is deliberately placed off center toward the hoist so that it appears centered when the flag is flying — the opposite decision from the one Japan made when it moved its disc to the true middle.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Palau
The yellow disc represents the full moon rather than the sun, which is the point people most often get wrong. It is also off center, and for the same reason as the previous flag.
Africa & the Americas
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Nigeria
Green, white, green, designed by a student in a national competition in 1959. His original entry had a red sun above the white band; the committee removed it, and he only learned his design had won from a newspaper.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Ghana
Red, gold and green with a black star, and that star is the origin of the phrase about the black star as a symbol of African independence. This was the first country south of the Sahara to gain independence from colonial rule.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Mali
Vertical green, yellow and red. It once carried a human figure in the center, removed in 1961 after objections that depicting the human form conflicted with religious practice.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Senegal
The same three colors as its neighbor arranged the same way, distinguished only by a green star in the middle. The two countries were briefly federated, which is why the flags are so close.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Ivory Coast
Orange, white and green — the Irish flag with the bands reversed. The two are among the most frequently mixed-up pairs in the world, and the order is the only difference.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Gabon
Green, yellow and blue: forest, equator and sea, read from top to bottom. It is one of the few flags whose three bands are meant to be read as a vertical cross-section of the country.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Chile
The single star and the layout predate the very similar flag of Texas by several years, which is a fact the country's own citizens raise more often than anyone else. The star is called the star of Chile in the official description.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Cuba
The triangle and stripes inspired the flag of Puerto Rico, which uses the same design with the red and blue exchanged. The two were designed by allied independence movements in the same period.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Panama
The quarters and the two stars stand for the country's two main political parties and the promise that they would alternate in power. Very few national flags encode a party-political arrangement so directly.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Colombia
The yellow band is twice the height of the other two, representing the land as greater than the sea and the blood. It shares its colors with two neighbors because all three were once a single republic.
Hard Mode — Lookalikes
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Luxembourg
Almost identical to the Dutch flag apart from a lighter blue and different proportions, and the confusion is old enough that the country now uses a second flag with a red lion for many purposes.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Latvia
The dark shade has its own name in the language, and a thirteenth-century chronicle describes a flag matching this one — which would make the design one of the oldest recorded anywhere, older than the country that flies it.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Sierra Leone
Green, white and blue for the land, the peace and the harbor. The harbor is specific: the capital sits on one of the largest natural harbors in the world, and the flag names it.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Yemen
Three plain bands with no emblem at all, using the colors adopted by several Arab republics in the twentieth century. Removing every symbol is itself the statement — the same three colors with an emblem belong to other countries.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Bolivia
The country has two official flags, and the second one is a square rainbow checkerboard representing indigenous peoples. Giving equal legal standing to two entirely different designs is close to unique.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Myanmar
Adopted in 2010, replacing a design that had stood for over thirty years. Flag changes of that kind are rare enough that they usually mark a change of state rather than of government.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Somalia
A single white star on light blue, and the five points stand for five regions where the people live — only two of which are inside the country's current borders. The blue was chosen to echo the United Nations flag.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Turkey
The star and crescent are far older than the country and older than Islam: they were symbols of the city now called Istanbul under earlier empires, and were inherited rather than invented.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Jamaica
The only national flag in the world containing none of red, white or blue. That is a genuinely unusual constraint — those three colors appear on the great majority of flags.
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Which country does this flag belong to?
Answer Guinea
Red, yellow and green in vertical bands: the same three colors as its eastern neighbor's flag, in the exact reverse order. Both were adopted within two years of each other around independence.
About the Flag Quiz
A flag has one job: to be identified at distance, at speed, by someone who cannot read the language. Most of them do it well, and the interesting ones are where the brief collapsed — where a dozen states independently arrived at three horizontal bands in slightly different orders, and the only thing separating two of them is a shade of blue.
This flag quiz shows fifty flags in five rounds of ten, starting with the ones almost everybody has, moving through Europe, then eastern Europe and Asia, then Africa and the Americas, and ending on a hard round built entirely from lookalikes. Four country names per flag, with the answer shown as you pick. Every flag is drawn here as plain vector shapes rather than photographed, so nothing is creased, shaded or flying at an angle.
That drawing has one consequence worth knowing about. Real flags differ in proportion — some are noticeably squarer or longer than others — and every flag on this page is drawn in the same wide frame. So one of the clues you would have in real life is gone, and the lookalike round is harder here than at a row of flagpoles. The colors, on the other hand, are drawn at their distinct official tones, which in one or two famous cases is the only difference there has ever been.
How it works
- The flag appears above the question with four country names below it. There is no timer.
- Choose one. The correct country is marked immediately and a wrong answer stays up for a moment; tap anywhere to move on.
- The rounds are ordered by difficulty rather than by size or importance, from the flags everyone knows to the ones that are routinely confused with each other.
- You finish with a mark out of fifty and five round scores, and the last of those five is the one worth reading.
- The list below the quiz is the answer key rather than a question list — the fifty countries in the order they were shown, since the wording of every question is identical. The flags themselves stay in the quiz.
Frequently asked questions
How do you tell lookalike flags apart?
Almost always by order, count or shade. Two neighbors in the hard round use the same three colors as each other in mirrored order, so the question is only ever which one is at the top or the hoist. One well-known pair of horizontal tricolors differs by nothing but the tone of the blue — one deep, one much lighter — and both tones are drawn faithfully here. Another pair differs by the width of the white band and the darkness of the red. And where two flags are otherwise identical, look for a star: several flags are a plain tricolor plus one small emblem.
Are the flags in this quiz drawn in the official colors?
They are drawn to the commonly published specifications, but no screen shows a color the way cloth does, and two devices side by side will not agree either. Where a distinction between two flags rests on shade alone, we have kept the gap wide enough to be visible on a phone in daylight rather than reproducing a hair-thin official difference nobody could see.
Where are the flags with crests and coats of arms?
Left out, on purpose. A detailed emblem redrawn as simple shapes stops being the flag and becomes our drawing of it, and you would be identifying our simplification rather than the country. So the set sticks to flags built from bands, crosses, stars and simple geometry — which is most of them, and all of the ones that get confused.
Flags change, don’t they?
They do, and more recently than people assume — several countries have adopted a new design in the last two decades, usually after a change of government. The set uses current designs. If a country redesigns its flag, that is the question that goes out of date first, and the answer list below is the version we stand behind until it does.
How many flags should I be able to name?
Thirty-five out of fifty. The first two rounds are close to free for most people, so the real measure is the last twenty: anyone clearing fifteen of those knows flags rather than merely recognizing them. The hard round is designed so that seven is a strong result.
Is it free, and do the flags load as images?
Free, with no account and no email. The flags are drawn as vector shapes in the page rather than fetched as pictures, so the whole set is light enough for a poor connection and the colors stay exact instead of being flattened by compression — which matters in the round built entirely from lookalikes.
How long does the Flag Quiz take?
Around seven minutes for the fifty. Four of the rounds move by region and the last one is nothing but near-identical pairs, so if your score falls apart at the end, that is the quiz working as designed rather than a sudden gap in what you know.