Flag Quiz
Some flags differ only by the order of their stripes, and that is where guessing gets hard.
A flag quiz where you see the picture and pick the country. The famous ones are left out: these are the look-alikes, mirror images and near-twins that people mix up most, each with a tip for telling them apart.
Did you know?
- Denmark's flag, the Dannebrog, is generally regarded as the oldest national flag still in use. Legend dates it to 1219, and it is recorded in use from the fourteenth century. Its off-centre cross was later copied by Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland, creating the family of Nordic cross flags.
- Romania and Chad fly almost identical flags of blue, yellow and red vertical stripes; Chad's blue is only slightly darker. The designs arose independently. Romania's flag carried a coat of arms in the centre until 1989, so the two only became near-twins after that emblem was removed.
- Jamaica's flag of green, gold and black is often cited as the only current national flag that contains no red, white or blue at all. Mauritania used to share that distinction, but it added two red stripes to its green and gold flag in 2017.
How to read a flag
The study of flags is called vexillology, a word coined in the late 1950s by the American scholar Whitney Smith from vexillum, the Latin name for a Roman cavalry banner. National flags in the modern sense are fairly young. Most were adopted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when new states wanted a simple sign that could be recognised from far away, at sea, on public buildings and in a crowd.
Why so many flags look alike
Flags come in families. The French tricolour of the 1790s inspired dozens of three-stripe designs across Europe and beyond. Green, yellow and red spread through Africa after Ghana adopted them in 1957, borrowing the colours of Ethiopia, and they became known as the Pan-African colours. White, blue and red are shared by many Slavic countries, and red, white, green and black by many Arab states. Because the same few colours are rearranged again and again, the order and direction of the stripes often matter more than the colours themselves.
Shapes and proportions
Almost every national flag is a rectangle, but the rectangles are not all alike. The most common proportions are two to three and one to two, which is why some flags look long and narrow beside others. Switzerland flies a square flag, and Togo's is close to the golden ratio. At the Olympic Games and the United Nations, flags are usually made in one shared shape so that no country's flag looks bigger than another, which means they do not always match the official proportions used at home.
Colours and symbols
Red, white and blue are by far the most common flag colours. Purple is the rarest: for centuries purple dye was too expensive for cloth that would be left out in the wind, and today it appears only in small details, such as the parrot on Dominica's flag. Stars, crescents, suns and crosses are the most frequent symbols. Designers who study flags generally give the same advice: use two or three colours, keep the design simple enough for a child to draw from memory and avoid lettering.