How to Name All 195 Countries: A Plan Built on What Players Forget
October 26, 2026 ยท 4 min read
Naming all 195 countries of the world from memory is one of the classic geography challenges. Our Countries of the World quiz is built for it: you type each country you can remember, and it lights up on a 3D globe. There is no clock and no multiple choice. Just you and the list.
Almost nobody gets all 195 on the first try. The ones people miss are not random, and our data from almost 67,000 answers across DodoThinks shows where the gaps usually are. This plan uses that.
Why 195?
There are 193 member states of the United Nations, plus two observer states: Vatican City and Palestine. That makes 195, the number most quizzes use, including ours. Our page on how many countries there are explains the edge cases, like Taiwan and Kosovo.
Roughly, they split like this:
| Continent | Countries |
|---|---|
| Africa | 54 |
| Asia | 48 |
| Europe | 44 |
| North America | 23 |
| Oceania | 14 |
| South America | 12 |
Africa alone is more than a quarter of the list.
Where people's knowledge runs out
On our map games, here is how often players find a country when asked:
| Region | Found |
|---|---|
| Europe | 73% |
| South America | 70% |
| Asia | 59% |
| Africa | 49% |
| North America (incl. Central America and the Caribbean) | 42% |
So the three places where most people lose countries are:
- Africa, because there are 54 countries, many of them small and in West Africa.
- Central America and the Caribbean, because most of the 23 countries of North America are small and many are islands.
- The small countries of Asia, especially in the Middle East, Central Asia and South-East Asia.
Pacific island countries are also easy to forget: Kiribati, Tuvalu, Nauru, Palau, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Samoa, Tonga, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and Fiji. If you are stuck near the end, check the Pacific.
The plan
Step 1: Go continent by continent
Do not type countries in the order they come to you. Pick one continent and finish it before moving on. The globe in our quiz helps: you can spin it and see the gaps.
Step 2: Sweep each continent in a fixed path
For each continent, follow a route instead of jumping around:
- Europe: start in Portugal, go up the Atlantic coast to Scandinavia, come down through the Baltics, Eastern Europe and the Balkans, then the microstates (Andorra, Monaco, San Marino, Vatican City, Liechtenstein, Malta). The Balkans are where most people lose countries; our Europe map article has the order.
- Africa: go around the coast clockwise from Morocco, then fill in the landlocked middle. Our Africa article has a full route.
- Asia: the Middle East first, then the five Stans, then South Asia, then East Asia, then South-East Asia. See the Asia article.
- The Americas: north to south, with Central America in order (Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama) and the Caribbean island by island. See Central America and the Caribbean.
- Oceania: Australia and New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, then the Pacific islands from west to east.
Step 3: Use the alphabet as a safety net
When you have finished your sweep and are missing a few, go through the alphabet. Countries starting with "M" (there are 18) and "S" (there are 26) are the biggest groups, so check those letters twice. Our page of countries by first letter lists them all.
Step 4: Do the short challenges
Our quiz also has quick challenges, like naming the five Stans or the countries of the Middle East. They take a minute and lock in the regions people forget most.
Common traps
- Countries with two names: Cรดte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Eswatini (Swaziland), Myanmar (Burma), Czechia (Czech Republic), Timor-Leste (East Timor), Cabo Verde (Cape Verde), North Macedonia.
- The two Congos, two Koreas and two Sudans. Each pair counts as two.
- Countries that are easy to think of as part of somewhere else: Moldova, Kosovo (not one of the 195 in most counts), Brunei, Bhutan, Djibouti, Lesotho and Eswatini.
Track your progress
Play the Countries of the World quiz once to get your baseline. Then pick the continent where you missed the most, practise it with the matching map quiz (Africa, Asia, North America) and come back. Seeing a country on a map is what makes its name stick.
About this data
The map numbers come from answers given on DodoThinks map quizzes between September and October 2026. See what 67,000 answers show for the full breakdown.