State Capitals Quiz

Multiple choice lets you recognize a capital. This quiz makes you produce it from memory and spell it, which is the harder and more durable skill. Fifteen states per game, about two minutes end to end.

How to play

A state name appears under "Capital of". Type the capital into the box and press Enter, or tap Submit.

• Fifteen states per game, drawn at random from all fifty, so the deck rotates every run.
• Matching ignores capitalization, accents and punctuation. Both "santa fe" and "Santa Fe" pass.
• A wrong answer prints the correct capital, then costs one of three lives.
• Skip also costs a life. There is no free pass out of a round you do not know.
• Three hearts gone ends the run. 14 out of 15 earns three stars, 9 earns two, 5 earns one.
• Best score and daily streak are saved in your browser, nowhere else.

Spelling traps that eat lives

The checker strips punctuation but it does not expand abbreviations, so a shortened form fails even when you knew the answer.

• Saint Paul has to be typed in full. "St. Paul" and "St Paul" are both marked wrong.
• Tallahassee carries a double L, a double S and a double E.
• Montpelier takes one L. The double L spelling belongs to a city in France.
• Bismarck ends in CK, Frankfort ends in ORT, and Pierre ends in RRE.
• Cheyenne and Annapolis each hide a double N, Harrisburg a double R.
• Juneau, Des Moines and Baton Rouge keep their French spelling.

The capitals people always miss

In 33 of the 50 states the capital is not the largest city, and nearly every miss in this game is a player typing the famous city instead. These ten are the widest gaps in the deck.

Oregon and Maine share a trap of their own. Oregon answers Salem and Maine answers Augusta, yet both states have a city called Portland, and Portland, Oregon is much the larger of the two. Two more pairs blur in the ear: Columbia is South Carolina while Columbus is Ohio, and Charleston is the capital of West Virginia while the larger Charleston sits in South Carolina, which answers Columbia.

In the other 17 states the capital does win, so the reflex to type the famous name pays off about a third of the time, which is exactly why it is so hard to unlearn. Phoenix, Boston, Denver, Indianapolis, Atlanta, Honolulu, Columbus, Oklahoma City, Salt Lake City and Nashville all reward it.

Keep drilling