THE CITY CHALLENGE
World’s 25 Most Populous Cities
From Jakarta and Dhaka to Tokyo, Delhi and Shanghai: name the world’s 25 biggest cities by population in 6 minutes. Each city you type appears on the world map; at the end, see the full ranking with every population.
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- Time left: 6:00
Type the world’s 25 most populous cities, counted as whole urban areas, before the 6:00 timer runs out. Each one you get appears as a dot on the map. English and local names both count, and so do old names such as “Bombay” or “Peking”.
Finding your next challenge…
The list, the names and sources
The 25 answers are the world’s largest cities by population in mid-2025, from Jakarta (41.9 million) down to Osaka (13.0 million), as estimated by the UN Population Division in World Urbanization Prospects: The 2025 Revision (File 18). Figures are rounded to the nearest thousand.
A “city” here is an urban area, not a municipality: the UN’s 2025 revision uses the Degree of Urbanisation, which 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 the official city population, and why places such as Delhi or Manila stand for their whole built-up area.
Older UN lists, based on each country’s own definition of its urban agglomerations, put Tokyo first. With one definition for every country, the 2025 revision puts Jakarta and Dhaka ahead of it.
Guangzhou’s urban area runs on into Foshan and Dongguan; Shenzhen, next door, is counted as a city of its own. Delhi’s urban area includes New Delhi, so “New Delhi” counts too.
Other usual names count too: “Bombay”, “Calcutta”, “Canton”, “Peking”, “Saigon”, “Bangalore”, “Mexico” or “CDMX” for Mexico City, and “New York City”. Cities ranked 26th to 100th by the same file, such as Lagos or Los Angeles, get a note with their rank.
There is no minefield mode: naming a real city outside the list simply gets a note, and the round goes on.
Each city’s dot sits at the UN’s population-weighted centre of its urban area. Coastlines and borders come from Natural Earth (public domain).
UN DESA Population Division: World Urbanization Prospects 2025 (File 18, the 100 largest cities)