Random Country Generator

How many countries are there in the world?

There are 195 sovereign states: the 193 members of the United Nations plus Vatican City and Palestine, both UN observer states. That is the number this generator draws from by default. Counts of 196 or 197 add Taiwan and Kosovo, which some countries recognise and others do not. Switch on “Include territories” and the pool grows to 229 by adding dependencies and overseas territories such as Puerto Rico, Greenland, Hong Kong and the Faroe Islands.

What the generator does

Press the button and it picks a country at random. Every country in the pool has exactly the same chance — the draw is not weighted by population, land area or how famous a place is, so Tuvalu comes up as often as the United States. The draw runs in your browser using its cryptographic random number generator, which is why it is instant and keeps working if your connection drops.

You can narrow it to one continent, or go finer and limit it to Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, West Africa, Central Asia or any other subregion. Ask for one country or for a list of up to fifty, with or without repeats.

Three ways to draw

• Single country — one result with its flag, capital, population and area, and a link to the full country profile.
• List — between 2 and 50 countries at once, numbered, with a copy button that puts the whole list on your clipboard. This is the one most people want when they search for 5 or 10 random countries.
• Wheel — a spinning wheel of fourteen countries drawn from your selection, reshuffled after every spin.

The same draw is also available as a plain country picker, a list generator and a wheel, and preset for Asia, Europe and Africa.

Who uses it

Teachers draw a country per pupil for geography projects. Quiz and pub-quiz writers build rounds that do not lean on the same twenty famous countries. Language learners pick a country and follow its news for a week. Travellers break a planning deadlock by drawing three candidates and seeing which one still appeals an hour later. Developers generate believable country data for test fixtures. Writers and game masters seed a setting.

Every country has a profile

Each result links through to that country’s own page, with its capital, languages, currency, climate, main industries, landmarks and a map. There are 229 of them, listed in full further down this page.

Where the data comes from

Population figures are 2024 estimates from the UN World Population Prospects and areas come from the CIA World Factbook. Transcontinental countries are assigned to a continent by where most of their population lives, so Russia is filed under Europe and Turkey under Asia. The data sources page sets all of this out, including what is approximate and why.

Questions