World Capitals Quiz: Match Countries and Their Capitals

How to play the world capitals quiz

Every country's capital appears as a dot on the map. The quiz has four ways to play:

• Click the country. The quiz names a capital ("Click the country whose capital is Nairobi") and you click Kenya.
• Type the capital. A country lights up, and you type its capital. Spelling is forgiving, and accents are optional.
• Multiple choice. Pick the capital of the highlighted country from four. The wrong answers are capitals of nearby countries, so you can't guess from the region alone.
• Drag labels. Drag capital names onto their countries.

Practice has no timer and brings misses back, the Quiz is timed with three tries each, and Challenge gives you 60 seconds of streaks. The results card lists every miss with the right answer beside it.

Capitals that aren't the biggest city

The most common mistake in any capitals quiz is choosing a country's most famous city. These are the ones to learn first:

Many of these are planned capitals, cities chosen or built to be the seat of government: Canberra, Brasília, Abuja, Islamabad, Naypyidaw, Astana and Washington, D.C. Governments often picked a new site to avoid favoring one big city or region over another, or to move the government toward the middle of the country.

Countries with two or three capitals

Some countries split the job of a capital:

• South Africa has three: Pretoria (the executive capital, where the president's offices are), Cape Town (where Parliament meets) and Bloemfontein (the judicial capital). The quiz uses Pretoria and accepts the other two.
• Bolivia: Sucre is the constitutional capital, and La Paz is the seat of government.
• Eswatini: Mbabane is the administrative capital; Lobamba is the royal and legislative capital.
• The Netherlands: Amsterdam is the capital in the constitution, but the government, parliament and king work in The Hague. The quiz accepts only Amsterdam, which is the answer most atlases give.
• Malaysia: Kuala Lumpur is the capital; most government offices moved to nearby Putrajaya.

Capitals that changed

Capitals move more often than you might think. These changes happened in the last few decades:

Indonesia is building a new capital, Nusantara, on the island of Borneo, but as of October 2026 the move hasn't been made official, and Indonesia's Constitutional Court confirmed in May 2026 that Jakarta remains the capital. Egypt is also moving ministries to a New Administrative Capital east of Cairo; Cairo is still the capital.

What makes a city a capital?

A capital is the city a country names as the seat of its government, usually in its constitution or its laws. That's normally where the head of government works, where the national legislature meets and where other countries put their embassies. Most of the time all three are in one city, which is why "capital" seems simple. The tricky cases on this page are the countries where the law and the day-to-day government point to different places.

Capitals also don't have to be big. Vatican City, Monaco and Singapore are both a country and a capital at once. Ngerulmud, the capital of Palau, is a government complex with very few residents, often called the least populous national capital. At the other end, Tokyo, Beijing, Jakarta, Cairo and Mexico City are among the largest urban areas in the world.

Capital records worth knowing

• Northernmost: Reykjavík, Iceland, at about 64° north.
• Southernmost: Wellington, New Zealand, at about 41° south.
• Highest: La Paz, Bolivia's seat of government, at about 3,600 m (11,800 ft). Quito, Ecuador, at about 2,850 m, is the highest capital that is a country's sole official capital.
• Lowest: Baku, Azerbaijan, about 28 m (92 ft) below sea level on the shore of the Caspian Sea.
• Closest together: Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Brazzaville (Republic of the Congo) face each other across the Congo River, only a few kilometers apart. Rome and Vatican City are even closer, because one sits inside the other.

These make good warm-up questions before a quiz round, and they help children see capitals as real places instead of a list of names.

Tips to memorize world capitals

1. Go one continent at a time. Each regional map quiz has a Capitals option: start with South America (12 capitals) and Europe, then Asia and Africa.
2. Learn the "same name" capitals first. Mexico City, Guatemala City, Panama City, Kuwait City, Singapore, Luxembourg, Monaco, San Marino, Vatican City and Djibouti are free points.
3. Study the trick table above. Planned capitals and "not the biggest city" capitals cause most misses.
4. Make stories. Ottawa sits on the river between Ontario and Quebec, the two biggest provinces. Canberra was built between Sydney and Melbourne so neither would be the capital.
5. Use multiple choice before typing. Recognizing a capital is easier than spelling it. Move to typing when you score above 90 percent.
6. Retry the misses. The results card shows the right answer for each miss. Run Retry missed until it's empty.

Keep learning

Pair the capitals with the world map quiz and the flag quiz, which use the same 197 countries. In the United States, the state capitals quiz works the same way. For families who like learning through travel stories and maps, the programs below are popular, and many scholarship programs on Edulist may cover curriculum like them.