List
The longest rivers in the world
Nile tops this list with 6 650 km. 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 | Mackenzie Beaufort Sea, Arctic Ocean | 4 241 km |
| 12 | Niger Gulf of Guinea, Atlantic Ocean | 4 200 km |
| 13 | Mississippi Gulf of Mexico | 3 766 km |
| 14 | Volga Caspian Sea | 3 531 km |
| 15 | Indus Arabian Sea (Indus Delta) | 3 180 km |
| 16 | Brahmaputra Bay of Bengal | 2 900 km |
| 17 | Danube Black Sea | 2 850 km |
| 18 | Amur Sea of Okhotsk (Strait of Tartary) | 2 824 km |
| 19 | Murray Southern Ocean (Encounter Bay) | 2 508 km |
| 20 | Rhine North Sea | 1 230 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: Nile is about 5.4 times the figure for Rhine, and Rhine is still inside 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.
Only countries that are members of the United Nations are ranked, so the list does not mix countries with territories that belong to another country. That is a choice, not a rule of nature, and a different atlas may well count differently.
Questions children ask
Which is the longest river?
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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