National Flag’s Colors Mapped
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A flag’s primary intention is to capture and represent national identity. Color is maybe the most influential of flags’ symbolic meaning.
Red signifies blood, bravery, sorrow, strength, fight, and revolution.
Blue is generally an optimistic color and usually means truth, freedom, perseverance, patriotism, honesty, and prosperity. It’s a symbol of forgiveness and the waters of baptism.
Yellow and gold most frequently symbolize the sun. They’re additionally used to mean prosperity and wealth.
Green is the color of the earth. It expresses the environment, nature, agriculture, and fertility.
White is the color of purity, honesty, peace, and innocence. Only a white flag is used to signal capitulation.
Black can symbolize various things, including ethnic heritage, quarantine, death, courage, and victory in battle.
Red, blue, and white are the most popular colors on flags.
Color | No. | % |
---|---|---|
Red | 148 | 77.08 |
White | 140 | 72.92 |
Blue | 102 | 53.13 |
Yellow & Gold | 89 | 46.30 |
Green | 87 | 45.31 |
Black | 59 | 30.73 |
Orange | 9 | 4.69 |
Brown | 9 | 4.69 |
Gray | 6 | 3.13 |
Purple | 2 | 1.04 |
Reddit user Udzu made an incredible chart showing the composition of red-white-blue flags.

Red is the most used color on national flags (148 or 77% of countries). Red also usually takes up the most flags area, covering an average of 30% of the space. The top 3 flags in redness are: China, with red taking up 97.63% of the area, followed closely by Morocco, with 97.62%. Turkey follows with 93.9%.

Chinese has a national flag with the highest percentage of red color. The map below shows national flags with the highest percentage of each color.
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
What happens if you mix all the colors of the flags into one? Reddit user KhaleesiDog used Flagpedia and Python, and BeautifulSoup colored every country with its official flag’s average pixel color (mean square value).

Reddit user ParadoxicalCabbage created another uncommon map that shows the average flag color by latitude.
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The world flags educational poster can be found on Amazon.