Rivers
50 World Rivers Quiz
From the Nile to the Thames: find 50 major rivers of the world on the map, name them in 10 minutes, or learn them with every river labelled.
Every river is labelled. Tap or click one (or pick it from the list) to see its length, where it starts and ends, and the countries it flows through. Zoom in to see every name.
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All rivers on this map
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Sources and notes
Rivers are drawn from Natural Earth’s 1:10m rivers and lake centerlines (public domain), with its European and North American supplements: each river’s named pieces are joined into one line from its source to its mouth, including where it runs through a lake. Tributaries are separate rivers, so the Missouri and the Mississippi, or the Blue Nile and the Nile, are drawn and named on their own.
River lengths depend on where you put the source and the mouth, and on how closely you follow the bends, so books disagree. The lengths here come from one source per river, each checked against at least one other reference or national agency: the CIA World Factbook where it lists the river and the others agree (the source the 10 longest rivers quiz uses), the US Geological Survey for rivers of the United States, and for the rest the river’s Wikipedia article or, where it publishes one, the river basin commission’s or water agency’s figure.
The Nile and the Amazon are the two longest rivers, and which one is longer is still argued. The World Factbook puts the Nile first (6,650 km against the Amazon’s 6,436 km); some studies that measure the Amazon from a more distant source in Peru put it ahead.
Some rivers are counted as systems in lists of the longest: the Mississippi–Missouri (6,275 km), the Yenisei–Angara (5,539 km) and the Ob–Irtysh (5,410 km). Here each river has its own length, so the Mississippi alone is shorter than the system it belongs to.
Other names count: the local name or an old spelling (Chang Jiang, Huang He, Ganga, Dnipro, Wisła), and you can add or leave out “River” or “Rio”.
Find on the map: we name a river, you click its line or 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 river is shown and the next one comes up.
Natural Earth: rivers and lake centerlines, 1:10m (public domain)
CIA World Factbook: Major rivers (CC0 factbook.json archive)
US Geological Survey: Largest Rivers in the United States (Open-File Report 87-242)
Wikipedia: river articles (CC BY-SA)
About these 50 rivers
The 20 essential rivers, then 30 more that geography courses and atlases feature: the Missouri, Mackenzie, Yukon, St. Lawrence, Colorado, Rio Grande and Columbia in North America; the Orinoco, São Francisco and Madeira in South America; the Tigris and Euphrates, the Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy and Salween, and the Syr Darya and Amu Darya in Asia; the Ural, Dnieper, Don, Elbe, Thames, Seine, Loire, Rhône and Tagus in Europe; the Orange, Limpopo and Senegal in Africa; and the Darling in Australia.
Some of them end in another river rather than the sea: the Missouri joins the Mississippi, the Madeira the Amazon, the Darling the Murray. The Syr Darya and Amu Darya flow into what is left of the Aral Sea.
The longest rivers on this map
- Nile 6,650 km (4,132 mi)
- Amazon 6,436 km (3,999 mi)
- Yangtze 6,300 km (3,915 mi)
- Yellow River 5,464 km (3,395 mi)
- Paraná 4,880 km (3,032 mi)
Each river’s length here is its own, measured by the source named in the notes below; lists of the longest rivers often count a river together with its headwaters or its biggest tributary.