Blank map
Blank map of the world with all 190 countries
Every country outline this site can score you on, in one printable unlabeled map built from the same Natural Earth geometry as the game — 130,789,943 km² of land and 7.62 bn people, with a labelled answer key and the area, population and capital of all 190 countries below.
The map, without labels
This is the whole board at once: 190 countries, each outline sitting where the country actually is, with nothing moved, enlarged or tidied up. It is the hardest map on this site to fill in, and not because any single border is difficult — it is because removing the frame removes the clues. On a map of Europe you can place Moldova by knowing it is east of Romania; on a world map you have to place the whole of Europe first, and the countries underneath it inherit every error you made above.
It is drawn in Web Mercator, the projection every web map uses, and that is a deliberate compromise you should know about before you trust your eyes with it. Mercator stretches both axes by the secant of latitude, so land at 60° N is drawn about four times too large and land at 70° N about eight times too large. That is why the classic claim that Greenland looks as big as Africa is true of the picture and false of the planet — and here, why Canada at 9,984,670 km² reads as roughly the same width as the whole of Africa. The five regional maps linked near the bottom of this page — Europe, Africa, Asia and the two Americas — are drawn equal-area instead, so if you want your mental map of relative sizes to be correct, practise from those and use this one for placement.
What is not on it matters as much as what is. There is no Antarctica, no Greenland, no French Guiana, no Puerto Rico, no Western Sahara — dependencies and unrecognised territories are not drawn as countries here, because the game does not ask you to draw them. The outlines that are here come from Natural Earth 1:50m admin-0 borders, simplified with the same point budget the scorer uses, so the shape you practise is the shape you are marked against.
At world scale the 15 smallest countries are not legible as shapes. Andorra, Palau, Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, Malta, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Marshall Islands, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Tuvalu, Nauru, Monaco, Vatican City cover 3,560 km² between them — you would need 2,392 of them put together to make one Brazil — so they are dots at best, and a dot smaller than the stroke width teaches you nothing. They are in the tables below with their capitals, which is where they belong.
Answer key — the same map with country names
A name is printed only where the outline is wide enough to hold it without covering a neighbour, so the Caribbean, the Caucasus and the Pacific stay blank here too. On a desktop browser, hover any outline to get its name in a tooltip; for everything else, read the names off the tables underneath.
How many countries are in the world? It is 190 here
Depending on which register you open, the answer is 193, 195, 197, 206 or about two hundred and fifty. Those are all counting something real — UN membership, UN observers, Olympic committees, every dependent territory — and none of them is the number on this page, because this page counts drawable shapes: the 190 countries the game carries, grouped by the continent field that organises its indexes. The practical consequence is that your teacher's map, a quiz app and this one can disagree by fifteen countries without anyone being wrong, so pick a register and stay inside it.
One line in the table below surprises people who have read a lot of atlases: by the areas this site uses, the 53 countries of Africa hold 23.1% of the world's listed land against 22.5% for the 45 of Asia. That is a convention rather than a discovery — the grouping files the whole of Russia under Europe, so Siberia's area is counted in the European row and Asia is measured without it. Put Russia's Asian landmass back on the Asian side of the Urals and Asia is comfortably the largest continent again. It is a good illustration of why any country list that does not state its own convention is just an argument waiting to happen — and why this page names its 190 rather than pretending the number is neutral.
| Continent | Countries | Area (km²) | Share | Population | Largest | Smallest |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Africa | 53 | 30,215,078 | 23.1% | 1.31 bn | Algeria | São Tomé and Príncipe |
| Asia | 45 | 29,394,068 | 22.5% | 4.53 bn | China | Singapore |
| Europe | 44 | 22,998,994 | 17.6% | 744.3 m | Russia | Vatican City |
| North America | 22 | 21,953,651 | 16.8% | 570.1 m | Canada | Saint Kitts and Nevis |
| South America | 12 | 17,737,675 | 13.6% | 427.1 m | Brazil | Suriname |
| Oceania | 14 | 8,490,477 | 6.5% | 41.6 m | Australia | Nauru |
The twenty largest, and what a world map does to them
These 20 countries hold 89,877,626 km² between them — about 69% of the land on the map, from 11% of its countries. Rank here is by real area; the rank your eye gives them on the Mercator canvas above is different, because the top of the list is northern and gets stretched. Note also that size and difficulty are unrelated: Uruguay is 181,034 km² drawn with a border detail of 1.42, while Norway, at 323,802 km², scores 23.39 — 16 times as much edge for the land it encloses.
| Rank | Country | Continent | Area (km²) | Detail | Pieces |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Russia | Europe | 17,098,242 | 7.50 | 1 |
| 2 | Canada | North America | 9,984,670 | 13.21 | 8 |
| 3 | China | Asia | 9,706,961 | 3.97 | 1 |
| 4 | United States | North America | 9,372,610 | 8.29 | 2 |
| 5 | Brazil | South America | 8,515,767 | 3.41 | 1 |
| 6 | Australia | Oceania | 7,692,024 | 2.88 | 1 |
| 7 | India | Asia | 3,287,590 | 5.35 | 1 |
| 8 | Argentina | South America | 2,780,400 | 3.71 | 1 |
| 9 | Algeria | Africa | 2,381,741 | 1.70 | 1 |
| 10 | DR Congo | Africa | 2,344,858 | 2.52 | 1 |
| 11 | Saudi Arabia | Asia | 2,149,690 | 1.79 | 1 |
| 12 | Mexico | North America | 1,964,375 | 6.87 | 1 |
| 13 | Indonesia | Asia | 1,904,569 | 15.34 | 13 |
| 14 | Sudan | Africa | 1,886,068 | 1.98 | 1 |
| 15 | Libya | Africa | 1,759,540 | 1.73 | 1 |
| 16 | Iran | Asia | 1,648,195 | 2.38 | 1 |
| 17 | Mongolia | Asia | 1,564,110 | 2.43 | 1 |
| 18 | Peru | South America | 1,285,216 | 3.11 | 1 |
| 19 | Chad | Africa | 1,284,000 | 1.89 | 1 |
| 20 | Niger | Africa | 1,267,000 | 1.95 | 1 |
The smallest 15, which are points rather than shapes
Everything under 500 km² on this map, in one table, because that is the size at which an outline stops being a useful thing to practise. All 15 of them together hold 3,560 km² — you would need 2,392 copies of the whole tier to make one Brazil — and Vatican City alone is smaller than a large airport. What is worth learning here is placement rather than shape: that Vatican City sits inside Rome, that Monaco is on the Ligurian coast east of Nice, that Nauru is a dot in the central Pacific, and that San Marino is a hill in the Apennines. Get those four right and you are ahead of most people's world map.
| Country | Continent | Capital | Area (km²) | Population | Pieces |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Andorra | Europe | Andorra la Vella | 468.00 | 77 k | 1 |
| Palau | Oceania | Ngerulmud | 459.00 | 18 k | 2 |
| Antigua and Barbuda | North America | Saint John's | 442.00 | 97 k | 2 |
| Barbados | North America | Bridgetown | 430.00 | 287 k | 1 |
| Saint Vincent and the Grenadines | North America | Kingstown | 389.00 | 111 k | 3 |
| Grenada | North America | St. George's | 344.00 | 112 k | 1 |
| Malta | Europe | Valletta | 316.00 | 503 k | 2 |
| Saint Kitts and Nevis | North America | Basseterre | 261.00 | 53 k | 2 |
| Marshall Islands | Oceania | Majuro | 181.00 | 59 k | 5 |
| Liechtenstein | Europe | Vaduz | 160.00 | 38 k | 1 |
| San Marino | Europe | City of San Marino | 61.00 | 34 k | 1 |
| Tuvalu | Oceania | Funafuti | 26.00 | 12 k | 1 |
| Nauru | Oceania | Yaren | 21.00 | 13 k | 1 |
| Monaco | Europe | Monaco | 2.02 | 39 k | 1 |
| Vatican City | Europe | Vatican City | 0.44 | 825 | 1 |
Which world outlines are the hardest to draw?
The ten highest border-detail scores on the planet, all of them computed from the outline you would actually be marked against. Two kinds of difficulty show up here. The first is a coast that will not sit still: Norway and Chile are long, fjord-cut or island-fringed shapes whose every kilometre of land carries an unreasonable amount of edge. The second is fragmentation — Solomon Islands in 14 pieces, Bahamas in 14 pieces, Vanuatu in 14 pieces — where a scattered archipelago is hard for a different reason: you are not remembering one outline, you are remembering a constellation and the spacing between its stars.
| Country | Detail | Pieces | Area (km²) | Continent | Tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Norway | 23.39 | 4 | 323,802 | Europe | hard |
| Chile | 21.47 | 2 | 756,102 | South America | hard |
| Philippines | 16.39 | 11 | 342,353 | Asia | hard |
| Kiribati | 15.98 | 14 | 811 | Oceania | hard |
| Solomon Islands | 15.66 | 14 | 28,896 | Oceania | hard |
| Indonesia | 15.34 | 13 | 1,904,569 | Asia | hard |
| Bahamas | 15.17 | 14 | 13,943 | North America | hard |
| Marshall Islands | 14.96 | 5 | 181 | Oceania | hard |
| Vanuatu | 14.75 | 14 | 12,189 | Oceania | hard |
| Canada | 13.21 | 8 | 9,984,670 | North America | hard |
Who touches whom, and why that is the real difficulty
A blank world map is mostly a placement problem, and placement is a chain. Put China wrongly and 13 neighbours move with it. These are the countries carrying the most contact in the dataset, counted from the border relations that ship with the game's country data — and every neighbour they imply is a country this site can actually draw, which is what makes the chain worth learning rather than memorising.
| Country | Neighbours | Continent | Area (km²) | Capital |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| China | 13 | Asia | 9,706,961 | Beijing |
| Russia | 13 | Europe | 17,098,242 | Moscow |
| Brazil | 9 | South America | 8,515,767 | Brasília |
| DR Congo | 9 | Africa | 2,344,858 | Kinshasa |
| Germany | 9 | Europe | 357,114 | Berlin |
| Austria | 8 | Europe | 83,871 | Vienna |
| France | 8 | Europe | 551,695 | Paris |
| Tanzania | 8 | Africa | 945,087 | Dodoma |
| Turkey | 8 | Asia | 783,562 | Ankara |
| Zambia | 8 | Africa | 752,612 | Lusaka |
| Hungary | 7 | Europe | 93,028 | Budapest |
| Iran | 7 | Asia | 1,648,195 | Tehran |
How to use a blank map of the world
- 01
Draw the container first
Before any country exists on the page, draw the frame the continents live in: the equator, the two tropics, and the circle of the Arctic. Most failed world maps are not failed country shapes, they are failed latitudes — Europe dragged down into the tropics, Australia pushed into the same band as South America. Six faint horizontal lines cost you ten seconds and fix the placement of about eighty countries at once.
- 02
Do Africa and South America as one gesture
They are the two great tapering wedges of the Western-and-southern hemisphere, and they are drawn the same way: a wide top that narrows towards the south, with a bulge on the east. Africa gets the horn on its right shoulder and Madagascar sitting off its south-east coast; South America gets its own eastern bulge in Brazil and the thin tail down to Tierra del Fuego. Get these two right and you have anchored three quarters of the southern landmass.
- 03
Build Eurasia as a stack, not a blob
The largest landmass on the map reads as three shelves: the Arctic shelf of Russia and Canada, the temperate shelf of Europe, China and the American plains, and the peninsular shelf that hangs underneath it — India, Arabia, South-East Asia, Iberia, Italy, Greece, Korea, Spain. Draw the shelves and then the peninsulas hanging off them, rather than trying to remember one continuous outline, and the whole northern continent stops collapsing into an unreadable lump.
- 04
Give the small countries a reserved lane
Central America, the Caribbean, the Pacific islands and the Caucasus are where blank maps go wrong, because there is no room. Draw them last, at the size they actually are, and accept that the smallest outlines on this page are dots: Vatican City is 0.44 km² and on a world canvas it is a dot smaller than the pen stroke. A dot in the right place beats a country drawn honestly large in the wrong one.
- 05
Check against the answer key, then redraw the same map
Mark what you missed, print a second copy and fill it in again in the same sitting. The second pass is where the map becomes yours. On the drawing game the same loop typically adds ten to twenty accuracy points between the first attempt and the second, because the score tells you which side of the outline you lost rather than just telling you that you lost it.
One drill worth more than the rest: with the answer key covered, say the countries in order of size, largest first. Proportion errors are what separate a decent mental map from a decorative one, and they cluster in the same three places — Europe's small countries drawn too large, Russia and Canada drawn oversized because that is what a Mercator screen showed them, and Africa shrunk to a continent "about the size of the United States", when its 53 countries hold 30,215,078 km² against 21,953,651 km² for the whole of North America. If your map holds Vatican City at 0.44 km² and Russia at 17,098,242 km² in the right proportions, the other 188 fit into place around them.
Other blank maps
Blank map of the world — questions
How many countries are in the world?
There is no single right answer, and the honest ones are all counting something different: the United Nations has 193 member states, it seats two permanent observers (the Holy See and Palestine), the International Olympic Committee recognises 206 territories, and every dependent territory on earth takes the count past two hundred and fifty. This map has 190, because it counts drawable shapes rather than diplomatic seats — the countries the game carries and can mark you against. It includes Somaliland, whose area we measured from its own outline because it has no ISO record, and it drops Antarctica, every dependent territory, and a small number of island states the dataset behind the game does not carry.
Which countries are missing from this world map?
Dependent territories are the largest group: Greenland, the French overseas departments including French Guiana, Bermuda, Puerto Rico, Réunion, Mayotte, New Caledonia and Aruba are all governed from outside and are not drawn as separate countries here. Neither is Antarctica, which has no government to name. Western Sahara and Palestine are absent. 53 African countries appear on this map where the African Union counts 55 and the UN counts 54: the two Indian Ocean states people notice first are Mauritius and Seychelles, which our dataset does not carry, while Somaliland does appear. If you need an exactly-UN-count classroom map, use this one for the outlines and check the roster against your own syllabus.
Can I print this blank world map for free?
Yes. The outlines are inline SVG rather than a photograph or a raster image, so they stay sharp at any paper size and print as black lines on white with no labels and no adverts. Use your browser's print command, choose landscape, and scale to fit — A3 or larger is worth it, because at A4 the Caribbean and the Pacific island states become too small to write inside. There is nothing to download and no sign-up, and the labelled answer key is further down this same page.
Why does this map look wrong if Africa is the biggest?
Because this canvas is Mercator, and Mercator stretches both axes by the secant of latitude: land at 60° N is drawn about four times too large and land at 70° N about eight times. So Canada — 9,984,670 km² of mostly sub-Arctic land — reads as a block comparable to Africa, whose 53 countries hold 30,215,078 km², more than the 22 of North America (21,953,651 km²) and more than the United States, China, India and non-Russian Europe put together (28,267,913 km²). The regional maps linked near the bottom of this page are drawn equal-area instead, so their sizes are honest; use this one for placement and those for proportion.
What is the largest country in the world?
Russia, at 17,098,242 km² — roughly 13.1% of all the land on this map, and about 57% of everything the 53 countries of Africa hold between them. Canada is second at 9,984,670 km², and the gap between first and second is 7,113,572 km²: Russia is about 71% larger than the biggest country underneath it, and 39 million Vatican Cities would fit inside it. Almost every world map has a Russia-shaped hole in it, and Mercator makes that worse rather than better, because nearly all of the country sits above 50° N, where the projection stretches land between two and eight times.
What is the smallest country in the world?
Vatican City, at 0.44 km² — under half a square kilometre, smaller than a good many city blocks. It is the extreme end of a whole tier: 15 countries here are under 500 km² and between them they hold 3,560 km², which is 0.003% of the land on this map. At that scale an outline stops being a drawable thing — the game centres and scales whatever you draw before comparing it, so a reasonably placed dot scores well and teaches you nothing — which is why these belong in a table as locations rather than on a map as shapes.
Which country on this map is hardest to draw?
By the site's own measurement of how much border a shape carries for the area it encloses, Norway scores highest at 23.39 — the fjords multiply its edge far beyond what any hand can reproduce — then Chile at 21.47, which earns its score by being 756,102 km² of land stretched into a ribbon with a broken Pacific side. Fragmentation is the other half of the problem: Solomon Islands in 14 pieces, Bahamas in 14 pieces, Vanuatu in 14 pieces have to be placed as a constellation rather than as one outline, and every piece is scored. At the other end of the same scale, Uruguay is 181,034 km² of almost straight lines, and it is still one of the easiest large countries on the map.
Which countries touch the most neighbours?
China and Russia are tied at 13 land borders each. That is the other reason a world map is hard: the interior of Eurasia and Africa is a chain of these contacts, and if you place one of them wrongly the error propagates along the whole chain. On the far side of the same measure, 35 of the 190 countries on this map have no land border at all — they are defined entirely by their own coastline, so nothing on the page can tell you whether you put them in the right place.
Is this the same map the game scores you against?
Yes, and that is the point of using it for practice. The outlines here are built from the same Natural Earth 1:50m admin-0 borders the game marks you against, simplified with the same point budget, so nothing is prettified for the printable version. When you draw a country in the game it is centred and scaled against that border, then scored on how much of the envelope you covered, with a nine-sector readout telling you which part of the outline you lost. Of the 190 countries on this map, 65 are tiered easy, 68 medium and 57 hard.
How do I learn the world map instead of just staring at it?
Pick three anchors and place every country against them: the Mediterranean as the seam between Europe and Africa, the Isthmus of Panama as the hinge between the Americas, and Indonesia as the gap between Asia and Australia. Then name the countries in order of size, largest first, with the key covered — that is the drill that fixes proportions, and proportions are what people get wrong most confidently on a world map. Greenland is a good test of this: it is not on our map at all, but on a Mercator canvas it would look the size of Africa, which is exactly the illusion the tables on this page are here to correct.