Cities
100 Largest Cities in the World Quiz
Jakarta, Dhaka, Tokyo, Delhi and 96 more: find the world’s 100 largest cities on the map, name them in 15 minutes, or click them from largest to smallest.
Every city is labelled. Tap or click one (or pick it from the list) to see its rank, country and population and, for most, one thing worth knowing about it. Zoom in to see every name.
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Sources and notes
The 100 answers are the world’s largest cities by population in mid-2025, from Jakarta (41.9 million) down to Jeddah (4.3 million), as estimated by the UN Population Division in World Urbanization Prospects: The 2025 Revision. Figures are rounded to the nearest thousand.
A “city” here is an urban area, not a municipality: the UN takes every contiguous square kilometre with at least 1,500 people and adds them up, whatever the administrative borders, as long as the whole area has at least 50,000 people. That is why its figures can be far above a city’s official population, why Delhi stands for its whole built-up area, New Delhi included, and why some urban areas carry the name the UN gives them rather than the best-known city in them.
Older UN lists, based on each country’s own definition, put Tokyo first. With one definition for every country, the 2025 revision puts Jakarta and Dhaka ahead of it.
Each city’s dot sits at the UN’s population-weighted centre of its urban area.
In Learn mode, national capitals have a white centre to their dot.
Other usual names count too: “Bombay”, “Calcutta”, “Madras”, “Bangalore”, “Canton”, “Peking”, “Saigon”, “Rangoon”, “Constantinople”, “New York City”, “CDMX”, “Rio” or “Joburg”. Accents are optional.
Find on the map: we name a city, you click its dot. Practice gives you three tries and highlights the right part of the map after two misses; Test gives you three tries without hints; Strict gives you one. After the last miss, the answer is shown and the next city comes up.
Largest to smallest: all 100 are labelled as far as they fit; click them from the largest (Jakarta) to the 100th. The difficulty levels work as in Find on the map.
Where cities are too close to tell apart at the zoom you are at (northern India, the Pearl River Delta, eastern China, Japan), their dots step apart, with a thin line to the true spot. Zoom in and each dot moves back to its place; every dot can always be clicked on its own.
Coastlines and borders come from official map data.
Maps: official map data
UN DESA Population Division: World Urbanization Prospects 2025 (File 18, the 100 largest cities)
About the world’s 100 largest cities
Nearly two thirds of them are in Asia: India and China alone have more than 30 between them, many close together on the plains of northern India, around the Yangtze and in the Pearl River Delta, where Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hong Kong almost touch. Africa has 20, from Cairo and Lagos to Kinshasa, Luanda and Johannesburg; the Americas have 11, and Europe only six, counting Istanbul and Moscow.
Some of the names may be new to you. The UN counts every city the same way, as one continuous built-up area, so crowded regions such as Kerala and Bihar in India become giant urban areas named after one of their towns, while famous cities such as Chicago or Sydney fall below the top 100.
The ten largest
- Jakarta Indonesia, 41.9 million
- Dhaka Bangladesh, 36.6 million
- Tokyo Japan, 33.4 million
- Delhi India, 30.2 million
- Shanghai China, 29.6 million
- Guangzhou China, 27.6 million
- Cairo Egypt, 25.6 million
- Manila Philippines, 24.7 million
- Kolkata India, 22.6 million
- Seoul South Korea, 22.5 million
UN estimates for mid-2025 of each whole built-up area, whatever the city limits; the notes below explain how the UN counts.