What flag is this?
Describe what you remember — the colours, roughly how it was arranged, any symbol, how many stripes. You do not need to get it all right: the tool ranks every one of the 196 national flags by how much of your description it actually matches.
Pick anything you remember above — a single colour is enough to start. The more you add, the tighter the shortlist gets.
Found it?
One flag a week, the real story behind it, and a quiz link to make it stick. No spam.
How this identifier works
Most flag lookups fail because they demand precision the person does not have. You saw a flag on a shirt, in a stadium, on a news broadcast — you remember two colours and “something in the middle”. A tool that requires an exact combination returns nothing and sends you away. This one scores instead of filtering: every flag gets a match score against whatever you selected, exact matches are listed first, and near misses follow underneath with a note saying precisely what matched.
That design is not theoretical. One of the most common searches that reaches VexiWikidescribes a flag with a rising sun and crossed rifles. No national flag has both: Guatemala carries crossed rifles, Mozambique carries an AK-47, and the rising-sun flags — Argentina, Uruguay, the Philippines, Kyrgyzstan, Malawi, Rwanda, Namibia, Japan, Kazakhstan, Ecuador — carry no weapon at all. A strict filter answers that search with an empty page. Ranked candidates answer it with the two flags that genuinely have crossed rifles, which is almost certainly what was seen.
Where the colour and stripe data comes from
The colours are not hand-typed. Every one of the 196 flag images is rendered and its pixels sampled, so each flag's palette and the share of the field each colour covers are measured from the same artwork you see on the page. A colour has to cover at least 4% of the flag to count as one of its colours; anything smaller is treated as an emblem detail and still searchable, but not described as one of the flag's colours. That distinction matters — the tiny red in Ecuador's coat of arms should not make it “a red flag”.
Layout and stripe counts are measured the same way, by scanning across the rendered flag and counting bands. Two deliberate details: the scan runs down the fly half, away from the hoist, because a canton — the small inset flag in the top-left of the United States, Greece and Liberia — otherwise interrupts the count and hides the very flags people are looking for. And crosses are identified before stripes, because a cross arm crossing a scan line is indistinguishable from a stripe: without that step Denmark reads as three horizontal bands rather than the Dannebrog.
Some geometries defeat any scan line. Saltires, Y-shaped palls, wavy bands and radiating suns all produce a banded signature they do not deserve, so those flags — South Africa, Jamaica, Vanuatu, North Macedonia, Nepal and a handful of others — are corrected by hand and each correction records why. The stripe-count filter only offers counts that actually occur in the data, so you can never pick a number that returns nothing.
Reading the result
Each card says what matched: “all your colours”, “2 of 3 symbols”, “5 stripes”, or “your colours (some only in the emblem)”. Use that line to work out which of your own recollections to loosen. In practice the stripe count and the symbol are the two details people remember differently from how the flag is actually drawn, so those are the first two to clear if nothing looks right.
Every result links to that country's full flag page — why those colours, what the symbol means, when it was adopted, what it replaced, and the flags it is genuinely confused with. If you have narrowed it to two or three candidates, the flag comparison tool puts any two side by side and lists exactly what they share and where they differ. If you want to test yourself instead, the flag quizzes are scored and shareable, and the historical flag timeline covers the case where the flag you saw is one a country no longer flies.
Prefer to browse rather than describe? The full flag index lists all 196 by continent, and flags by feature groups them by what is actually drawn on them.