North America Map Quiz: All 23 Countries

Quick check before you start: how many countries are in North America? Most people say three. The UN says 23, because the region runs from Canada all the way down through Central America and across the whole Caribbean. This map quiz covers every one of them, which is why “the easy continent” quietly isn’t.

Three countries of padding, then the real quiz

Canada, the United States, and Mexico are your warm-up clicks. After that the quiz descends into Central America, seven countries in a narrowing corridor, and order matters: Guatemala and Belize share the top (Belize on the Caribbean side), then Honduras and El Salvador side by side (El Salvador the only one with no Caribbean coast), then Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama in a straight run to South America. Learn it as a north-to-south chant and it never leaves you.

Then the Caribbean, where the remaining countries hide, and where this quiz earns its difficulty rating. The Greater Antilles are the big learnable islands: Cuba, then Hispaniola split between Haiti (west) and the Dominican Republic (east), then Jamaica below Cuba and Puerto Rico to the east, though that last one is a US territory, not a country. The Lesser Antilles are the tricky part: a curve of small island nations arcing toward Venezuela, including Saint Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, and Barbados sitting out east of the arc. Nobody places all of these on their first attempt. That’s what the zoom and the miss-replay are for.

One more that ambushes people: the Bahamas aren’t in the Caribbean Sea at all, sprawling instead across the Atlantic north of Cuba. And don’t confuse Dominica with the Dominican Republic; the quiz certainly won’t apologize when you do.

Filling in the neighborhood

The world capitals quiz will happily test you on the Caribbean capitals you just learned to place, and the Central American chant pairs beautifully with a run through the capitals quizzes. For the full hemisphere, add the South America map quiz and own everything from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego.