Rivers
US Rivers Quiz
The Mississippi, the Missouri, the Colorado and 22 more: find 25 major US rivers on the map, name them in 6 minutes, or learn them first.
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 states it flows through. Zoom in to see every name.
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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.
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.
The US map uses the same Albers projection as our other US maps, with Alaska and Hawaii in insets, so only the Alaska stretch of the Yukon is drawn; its facts cover the whole river, from British Columbia to the Bering Sea.
There are two Red Rivers in the United States. This quiz’s Red River is the southern one, which forms much of the Texas–Oklahoma border and joins the Atchafalaya and Mississippi in Louisiana; the Red River of the North flows from Minnesota and North Dakota into Canada.
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)
Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin: Potomac basin facts
About these 25 rivers
The longest rivers of the United States (the Missouri, Mississippi, Yukon, Rio Grande, Arkansas, Colorado, Red, Brazos, Columbia, Snake, Platte, Ohio and Pecos), and the rivers that shaped its history and cities: the Hudson, Susquehanna, Potomac, Delaware and Connecticut in the East, the Yellowstone, Cumberland, Tennessee, Wabash and Illinois in the middle of the country, and the Sacramento and San Joaquin of California’s Central Valley.
Most of them end in another river: almost half of the list drains into the Mississippi, which carries their water to the Gulf of Mexico.
The longest rivers on this map
- Missouri 4,088 km (2,540 mi)
- Mississippi 3,766 km (2,340 mi)
- Yukon 3,187 km (1,980 mi)
- Rio Grande 3,058 km (1,900 mi)
- Arkansas 2,350 km (1,460 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.