World Capitals
Match countries to their capitals in a free, timed browser game. Twenty countries, four choices each.
GeographyWorld Currencies
Currencies are named after the people who minted them, which is why the names are so unpronounceable in English. Below: the etymologies that make half of them guessable, and the two that always cause trouble.
Choose your difficulty
Pick a level to start playing. You can switch at any time.
How to play
Read the country, then tap its currency.
Tip: your progress and best score are saved in this browser only.
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GeographyWhat you are actually practicing
Currencies are named after the people who minted them, and the English names are usually the Latin or Greek root left behind. So the currency of Greece is the drachma, of Turkey the lira, of Poland the zloty — and they sound nothing like the country.
This is a vocabulary game wearing a geography costume, and once you hear the root words it becomes far easier than it looks.
How the game works
You are shown a country and four currencies. Pick the right one. A wrong pick reveals it immediately.
Easy uses the currencies everyone meets first. Medium widens the set. Hard uses the full list, including the pairs that share a root but not a country.
The roots worth knowing
Latin roots: lira (Italy, from libra, a pound of silver), real (Brazil, "royal"), peso (Mexico, and most of Spanish America).
Greek roots: drachma (Greece), euro (from Europe).
Named after the place: yuan (China), won (Korea), ringgit (Malaysia), rupiah (Indonesia), baht (Thailand), zloty (Poland), forint (Hungary).
Named after something else entirely: dollar (from the thimble thaler), pound (a weight of silver), franc (the Franks), krone ("crown").
Strategies that actually raise your score
Spot the root, not the country. "Real" points at Brazil, "lira" at Italy, "baht" at Thailand. Once you know the roots the country is half the work.
Watch the two Scandinavian kroners. Norway has the Norwegian krone and Denmark the Danish krone — same word, different country. A country-shaped clue beats a word-shaped clue.
Eliminate by what it cannot be. If one option is the euro, it cannot be the right answer unless the country uses the euro. Most of these questions have one obvious mismatch.
Read the option as a phrase. "Thai Baht" and "Japanese Yen" are names with a country attached; the odd one out is often the option that is only a bare word.