List
The longest rivers in the world
The Nile tops this list with 6 650 km. The Amazon comes second. Here are the top 20, each one a link to its own page.
| # | Name | Number |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nile Mediterranean Sea | 6 650 km |
| 2 | Amazon Atlantic Ocean | 6 400 km |
| 3 | Yangtze East China Sea | 6 300 km |
| 4 | Yenisei Kara Sea (Arctic Ocean) | 5 539 km |
| 5 | Yellow River (Huang He) Bohai Sea | 5 464 km |
| 6 | Ob Gulf of Ob, Kara Sea | 5 410 km |
| 7 | Paraná Río de la Plata, Atlantic Ocean | 4 880 km |
| 8 | Congo Atlantic Ocean | 4 700 km |
| 9 | Mekong South China Sea | 4 350 km |
| 10 | Lena Laptev Sea (Arctic Ocean) | 4 294 km |
| 11 | Irtysh the Ob near Khanty-Mansiysk | 4 248 km |
| 12 | Mackenzie Beaufort Sea, Arctic Ocean | 4 241 km |
| 13 | Niger Gulf of Guinea, Atlantic Ocean | 4 200 km |
| 14 | Missouri River Mississippi north of St. Louis | 3 767 km |
| 15 | Mississippi Gulf of Mexico | 3 766 km |
| 16 | White Nile joins the Blue Nile at Khartoum to form the Nile | 3 700 km |
| 17 | Volga Caspian Sea | 3 531 km |
| 18 | Salween Andaman Sea (Gulf of Martaban) at Mawlamyine, Myanmar | 3 289 km |
| 19 | Purus Amazon (Solimões), west of Manaus | 3 211 km |
| 20 | Yukon Bering Sea (Yukon–Kuskokwim Delta), Alaska | 3 190 km |
What is being measured here
A river’s length depends on where you decide it begins. Rivers start as many small streams, and choosing a different stream as the true source changes the total by hundreds of kilometres. That is the whole reason the Nile and the Amazon still argue about which is longest.
The two ends of this list are further apart than they look: the figure for the Nile is about 2.1 times the one for Yukon — and Yukon is still in the top 20 of the whole world.
How to read this list
Read the list from the top down. The left column is the rank, the middle one is the name — every name is a link to a page that explains the place for children — and the right column is the figure the ranking is built on. Nothing here is rounded to make a nicer story: if two entries are close together, they are genuinely close together.
Questions children ask
Which are the longest rivers in the world?
The Nile is first on this list.
Where do the numbers in this list come from?
They come from public datasets, named at the bottom of this page, and the ranking is calculated from them rather than copied from another list. Where a figure is genuinely disputed, the page for that place says so.
How many entries are on this list?
This list shows 20, ordered by real figures from the datasets named at the bottom of the page.
Where these numbers come from
Areas, coastlines and neighbours from the ISO 3166 dataset; population from the World Bank (2018); mountain and river figures checked individually. Ranks are calculated, not copied.
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