North America Map Quiz: Find the 23 Countries of North America

How to play the North America map quiz

The map shows North America from Alaska and the Canadian Arctic down to Panama, with the Caribbean islands to the east. Greenland, Bermuda and the Caribbean territories are gray, and so is northern South America.

• Click the map. The quiz names a country ("Click Nicaragua") and you click it. A wrong click tells you which country you hit.
• Type the name. One country is highlighted; type its name. "USA" and "United States of America" work for the United States.
• Multiple choice. Pick from four names; the wrong answers are usually neighbors.
• Drag labels. Drag all 23 names onto the map, or tap a name and then its country.

Practice is untimed, the Quiz is timed with three tries per country, and Challenge is 60 seconds of streaks. Your best score in each mode stays on this device.

The 23 countries of North America

North America has three parts. The UN calls them Northern America, Central America and the Caribbean.

The three big countries cover almost 90 percent of the land. The 20 smaller countries are close together in the south and east, which is where most of the quiz happens. For a closer look, the Central America map quiz and Caribbean map quiz each zoom in on one part.

Capitals of North America

A common mix-up: Canada's capital is Ottawa, not Toronto or Montreal, and the US capital, Washington, D.C., is a federal district, not a state.

Physical geography of North America

North America is the third-largest continent, about 24.7 million km² (9.5 million sq mi), and it reaches from the Arctic almost to the equator. Its major features help you place the countries:

• The Rocky Mountains run from Alaska and western Canada through the western United States into Mexico, where the Sierra Madre ranges continue south.
• Denali in Alaska is the highest point on the continent, 6,190 m (20,310 ft).
• The Great Lakes (Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario) sit on the US–Canada border and hold about a fifth of the world's fresh surface water. Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake by area in the world.
• The Mississippi and Missouri rivers drain the middle of the United States into the Gulf of Mexico (called the Gulf of America by the US government since 2025).
• Hudson Bay is a huge inland sea in northern Canada, connected to the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans.
• The Canadian Shield, ancient rock scraped bare by glaciers, covers much of eastern and northern Canada, dotted with thousands of lakes.
• The isthmus of Central America narrows to about 50 km in Panama, where the Panama Canal links the Atlantic and Pacific.

Where does North America end?

Continents don't always have neat edges, and North America has three fuzzy ones.

• In the south, geographers end North America at the border between Panama and Colombia. Everything north of that line, including all of Central America, is part of the North American continent.
• In the east, Greenland and the Caribbean islands are counted with North America even though they are islands, because they sit on or next to the North American plate. Bermuda, far out in the Atlantic, is grouped with North America too.
• In the northwest, Alaska is separated from Russia's Chukotka region by the Bering Strait, only about 82 km (51 mi) wide. Two small islands in the strait, Big Diomede (Russia) and Little Diomede (United States), are less than 4 km apart.

Some countries, especially in Latin America and Europe, teach the Americas as one continent with North and South America as parts of it. That is why you may see the Olympic rings explained as five continents, or a textbook that lists six. Both are reasonable conventions; this quiz follows the seven-continent model most US schools use.

Tips to memorize North America

1. Place the big three. Canada on top, the United States in the middle (with Alaska attached to Canada's northwest), and Mexico below. That's the frame.
2. Walk down Central America. From Mexico: Guatemala and Belize, then El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama.
3. Learn the Caribbean in two groups. First the big islands (Cuba, Jamaica, and Haiti and the Dominican Republic on Hispaniola) and the Bahamas north of Cuba. Then the small arc in the east, from Saint Kitts and Nevis down to Trinidad and Tobago.
4. Use the magnifier. The eastern Caribbean islands are tiny at continent scale. Click them in the magnifier circle until you can find them without it.
5. Connect to the states. Children who already know the 50 states have a head start: the US states quiz and this quiz use the same controls.

North America by the numbers

About 600 million people live in North America. The United States has the most, about 345 million, followed by Mexico, about 131 million, and Canada, about 40 million. The smallest country is Saint Kitts and Nevis, about 261 km² with roughly 47,000 people, the smallest country in the Americas by both area and population. English, Spanish and French are the most widely spoken languages; French is an official language of Canada and of Haiti.

Keep learning

Go deeper with the Central America map quiz and the Caribbean map quiz, or head south to the South America map quiz. The Americas flags quiz adds every flag from Canada to Argentina. Literature-based history and geography programs for North America, like the ones below, are popular with homeschool families.