Flags of the world

All 196 country flags, each with the colours measured off the artwork, the flags it gets confused with, neighbours, and the numbers behind the country. 82 of them have at least one flag close enough to trip people up.

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Africa 54

Asia 47

Europe 46

North America 23

Oceania 14

South America 12

Why flags get confused

Most mix-ups come from a small number of families. Horizontal tricolours in red, white and blue account for a stack of them, and Chad and Romania are close enough that the difference is a shade of blue. Mirror pairs are the other trap: Ireland and Ivory Coast carry the same three colours in opposite order, as do Poland and Indonesia flipped top to bottom.

Each country page here lists its closest matches, scored by comparing the actual flag images rather than by grouping them by hand. Learning them in pairs works better than learning them alphabetically, which is the method the flags guide goes through in more detail.

Country data and flag artwork from the mledoze/countries dataset, used under ODbL 1.0.