Countries of the World: Easy memory edition

So there’s a rather famous quiz which gets you to name all the countries in the world. It’s here, and if you haven’t played it, I recommend you have a go. It’s quite fun.

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Back? Okay. So you probably didn’t get all 197, which is fair. There’s a LOT of countries in the world, and most of them you never hear about, particularly in Western countries. I wanted to get better at this, though, and so I devised a plan: break up all 197 countries of the world into categories of ten or fewer countries a piece, for ease of memorisation.

So that’s exactly what I did. And behold, that’s exactly what’s on this page.

Caveats

I’m not saying this is how the countries should be categorised. Hell, some of them are completely arbitrary, and other categories which are similar to real life ones (like Central Europe) are… pretty questionable with what they include and what they don’t. However, my goal was for each category to have no more than ten countries in each, and I succeeded in that respect. Apologies to any geographers and sociologists reading this. Please, if you want to make your own categories, I’d love to see them.

Without further ado, here’s the categories, and the countries within!

Country categories

BIG COUNTRIES

These are the six largest countries on Earth, so you should probably know them at the very least.

MIDDLE EAST NORTH

Everything in the Middle East that’s north of Saudi Arabia.

MIDDLE EAST SOUTH

Everything ELSE in the Middle East.

CAUCUSUS

The three countries in the Caucasus Mountains. Nice and short.

STANS

All the countries ending with “-stan”, which all happen to be in Central Asia.

EAST ASIA

Pretty self-explanatory, discounting China because we already had that.

SOUTH EAST ASIA

An example of a group of countries that cuts off somewhat arbitrarily…

ASIAN ISLANDS

…because I put the countries on islands in here. Excluding Japan. Wow, this list is great, isn’t it?

BIG OCEANIA

All the countries in Oceania above 1000 square kilometres.

TINY OCEANIA

All the tiny countries in Oceania.

AFRICAN ISLANDS

All the island countries surrounding and part of Africa.

NORTH AFRICA

A bunch of countries in North Africa.

GUINEA REGION

All the West African countries part of the Guinea region.

WEST AFRICA

All the West African countries we haven’t covered yet.

CENTRAL AFRICA

All the countries in Central Africa. Shocking, I know.

RIFT VALLEY

All the countries along the Rift Valley of Africa, including the countries surrounding the African Great Lakes.

SOUTHERN AFRICA

All the countries around the southern end of Africa.

SOUTHERN AMERICA

Not South America, but the southern part of South America.

THE NORTH OF THE SOUTH

The northern part of South America. Not confusing at all!

THE SAINTS COME MARCHING IN

All three countries called “Saint” something.

CARIBBEAN

The other island countries in the Caribbean.

CENTRAL AMERICA

All the countries in Central America. Also Mexico as well.

EUROPEAN MICROSTATES

The tiniest of countries in Europe.

FORMER YUGOSLAVIA

The seven countries that make up what was once Yugoslavia.

BALTICS AND NORDICS

The eight countries in the northern north of Europe.

WESTERN EUROPE

What most people think of when they think “European country”.

SOUTHERN EUROPE

The actually warm parts of Europe. Thanks, Mediterranean Sea!

EASTERN EUROPE

Self-explanatory, the eastern part of Europe.

CENTRAL EUROPE

The final three countries, a small selection of Central European countries.

Done!

That’s all of them. At least, right now. Bougainville (an autonomous region of Papua New Guinea at time of writing) is in the process of gaining independence, so when that happens, I’ll add it to the list, in the Big Oceania section. More places could also declare and gain independence in the future, or merge into a bigger one. Fun how geography works.

Hope this was helpful! Feel free to toy around with it in case it wasn’t.