Country Nicknames
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50 free Country Nicknames trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Almost every nation answers to a second name. Some were handed out by poets, explorers and visiting politicians, some were coined by satirists or rival rulers, and a few are simply what the official name turns out to mean once it is translated. This quiz works through the best known of them. Most questions give the nickname and a clue and ask which nation it belongs to; others turn the puzzle round and ask what a name means, who first used it, or what inspired it. Every answer comes with a short explanation of where the name came from. It is pitched for geography fans, pub quiz teams and classrooms. The opening questions are ones most people can reason out, and the later ones reward anyone who has spent time with an atlas or a history book.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which country, whose own name means 'sun origin', is nicknamed the Land of the Rising Sun?
Japan
Japan calls itself Nihon or Nippon, and its flag, known at home as the Hinomaru or 'circle of the sun', carries the same idea as a single sun disc.
Q 02Which gemstone gives Ireland its best-known nickname, an image traced to a 1795 poem by William Drennan?
Emerald
The Emerald Isle owes its name to lush vegetation, a product of Ireland's mild climate and frequent rainfall.
Q 03Which country is nicknamed lo Stivale, 'the Boot', because of the shape of the peninsula it occupies?
Italy
Italy's boot even has named parts: Calabria is the Toe, Salento is the Heel and Gargano is the Spur.
Q 04Which country is nicknamed Oz and, after the ironic title of a 1964 book by Donald Horne, the Lucky Country?
Australia
Australia took the title as a compliment, but Horne meant it as a rebuke: he argued the nation had prospered on luck rather than on the strength of its political or economic system.
Q 05Which country did Archbishop Desmond Tutu call the Rainbow Nation after its first democratic election in 1994?
South Africa
South Africa's rainbow image grew out of Tutu's televised talk of the 'Rainbow People of God', his picture of a country united after apartheid.
Q 06Which country is informally called Holland, a name that strictly belongs to just two of its twelve provinces?
Netherlands
The Netherlands gets called Holland because North and South Holland, home to Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague, long dominated the country's trade and politics.
Q 07Which country is nicknamed the Great White North, a name shared with Bob and Doug McKenzie's SCTV sketch?
Canada
Canada's nickname reached a wider audience when Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, as the McKenzie brothers, turned their sketch into a bestselling 1981 comedy album.
Q 08New Zealand's Māori name, Aotearoa, is most often translated as 'the land of the long white' what?
Cloud
Cloud is the usual reading: in one tradition the explorer Kupe's crew knew land was near when they saw a long cloud hanging over it.
Q 09Which country did the Greek historian Herodotus famously describe as the gift of the Nile?
Egypt
Egypt earned the phrase because its ancient civilisation depended on the river's resources and shaped its whole culture around them.
Q 10Which country's name for itself, Zhongguo, is usually translated as the Middle Kingdom or Central State?
China
China's 'Middle Kingdom' label reached European languages through the Portuguese in the 16th century and became popular in the mid-19th.
Q 11Which personification of the United States is linked by legend to a meat packer from Troy, New York?
Uncle Sam
Uncle Sam only got a standard look during the First World War, from James Montgomery Flagg's recruiting poster, itself inspired by a British one of Lord Kitchener.
Q 12Mainland France is nicknamed after which shape, an image first seen in geography texts of the 1850s?
The Hexagon
The Hexagon is so familiar that in 2023 French deputies voted to write l'Hexagone in place of 'métropole', a term judged colonial, in a defence bill.
Q 13Which northern European country is called the Land of a Thousand Lakes, though it has well over 150,000?
Finland
Q 21Stilt houses on Lake Maracaibo are said to have reminded Amerigo Vespucci of which city, inspiring the name Venezuela?
Venice
Venice inspired Veneziola, 'Little Venice', which became Venezuela in Spanish, though a member of Vespucci's own crew told the story of the name differently.
Q 22Which South American country probably takes its name from a tree once prized in Europe for its red dye?
Brazil
Brazil was officially the 'Land of the Holy Cross' in early Portuguese records, but sailors and merchants in the brazilwood trade called it the 'Land of Brazil' instead.
Q 23Which Asian land was dubbed the Land of the Morning Calm in the title of an 1880s book by Percival Lowell?
Korea
Korea's nickname is a fanciful reading of the characters for Joseon, the old name of the kingdom, which more plainly mean 'morning freshness'.
Finland is about a tenth water and roughly three-quarters forest, which makes it the most forested country in Europe.
Q 14Which Southeast Asian country, where people greet one another with the prayer-like wai, is nicknamed the Land of Smiles?
Thailand
Thailand's wai does far more than say hello: the gesture also serves for farewells, thanks and apologies, and changes with the status of the person receiving it.
Q 15Argentina's name comes from the Latin word for which metal, sought by the region's early European explorers?
Silver
Silver is argentum in Latin, and the first European explorers of the region chased a widespread legend of fabulous silver deposits somewhere upriver.
Q 16Which country is called Das Land der Dichter und Denker, the land of poets and thinkers, by many who live there?
Germany
Germany's literary boast, backed by names such as Goethe and Schiller, is hardly known outside the German-speaking world.
Q 17Which country prints the Latin name Helvetia on its coins and stamps and uses the country code CH?
Switzerland
Switzerland falls back on Latin when using any or all of its four official languages would be awkward, and CH stands for Confoederatio Helvetica.
Q 18Which part of the United Kingdom is known as the Land of Song, famed for male voice choirs and harpists?
Wales
Wales owes its male voice choirs to 19th-century chapels, where they formed from the tenor and bass sections of the congregation's singers.
Q 19Which country, blessed with highly fertile chernozem soil, is often called the Breadbasket of Europe?
Ukraine
Ukraine's plentiful rye and wheat shape its cooking too, going into the many kinds of bread at the heart of the national cuisine.
Q 20Which Asian island nation has a name meaning 'Lion City' in Sanskrit, even though lions never lived there?
Singapore
Singapore owes the name to legend: the Malay Annals tell of the prince Sang Nila Utama seeing a strange beast while hunting and being told it must be a lion.
Q 24What does the name Costa Rica mean in Spanish, a label some accounts credit to Christopher Columbus in 1502?
Rich coast
Rich coast was the verdict after Columbus reached the eastern shore on his final voyage and reported vast quantities of gold jewellery worn by the people there.
Q 25Which country is called the Graveyard of Empires after British, Soviet and American failures there?
Afghanistan
Afghanistan has worn the label only recently: applied to that country, the phrase seems to date from a 2001 Foreign Affairs article by Milton Bearden.
Q 26Which island nation is known as the Great Red Island because of its prominent rust-coloured laterite soils?
Madagascar
Madagascar, the world's fourth-largest island, shows its orange-red earth wherever erosion has stripped the grass from the Central Highlands.
Q 27Which country's name, coined in a 1933 pamphlet by Choudhry Rahmat Ali, is taken to mean 'Land of the Pure'?
Pakistan
Pakistan began as an acronym built from the names of its homelands, and it also works as a word: pak means 'pure' in Persian and Pashto and -stan means 'land'.
Q 28Which Caribbean island's name comes from Xaymaca, an Indigenous word said to mean 'Land of Wood and Water'?
Jamaica
Jamaica's Indigenous name, also translated as the 'Land of Springs', outlived Santiago, the name the island carried as a Spanish colony until England seized it in 1655.
Q 29Which Himalayan land calls itself Druk Yul, the Land of the Thunder Dragon, and shows the dragon on its flag?
Bhutan
Bhutan's flag dragon, the Druk, clutches a jewel in each of its claws, and the country's kings are styled Druk Gyalpo, the Dragon King.
Q 30Who popularised Uganda's nickname, the Pearl of Africa, in a book written after touring the country in 1907?
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill made the visit more than thirty years before he became prime minister, and Uganda's tourism industry traces its roots to his praise.