How many of the 118 chemical elements can you name? This quiz puts the whole periodic table in front of you as an interactive grid — every tile from hydrogen to oganesson — and asks you to fill it in.
It's a favorite with chemistry students before exams, but no lab coat is required. Most people can rattle off oxygen, gold, and iron; the real test is the lanthanides, the actinides, and the superheavy elements along the bottom rows.
Every element you get lights up in its place on the table, so you also learn where it sits — which column, which period, and which family it belongs to.
How to play
Type an element's name into the answer box — correct answers light up on the table instantly, and you can start typing from anywhere on the page without clicking the input first.
Spelling is lenient: American and British forms both work (sulfur/sulphur, aluminum/aluminium, cesium/caesium), and classic Latin names count too — typing "Ferrum" reveals iron and "Natrium" reveals sodium.
Three ways to play: Write All Elements (type all 118), One Element per Letter (name one element for each letter A–Z), and a click mode where we name an element and you find its tile on the table.
You can filter by family to drill a single group — just the noble gases, just the halogens, or the full set of 38 transition metals.
A timer tracks your run, and you can give up at any point to reveal every element you missed.
What counts in this quiz
All 118 IUPAC-confirmed elements, from hydrogen (1) to oganesson (118) — including the four elements officially named in 2016: nihonium, moscovium, tennessine, and oganesson.
The elements are organized into ten families you can also play individually: alkali metals, alkaline earth metals, transition metals, post-transition metals, metalloids, nonmetals, halogens, noble gases, lanthanides, and actinides.
A couple of placement calls worth knowing: tennessine is grouped with the halogens and oganesson with the noble gases based on where they sit in the table — their real-world chemistry is barely known, since only a handful of atoms of each have ever been made.
Hydrogen is grouped with the nonmetals here, even though the table draws it above the alkali metals — chemically it doesn't behave much like either family.
Good to know
J and Q are the only letters of the alphabet that appear in no element symbol — every other letter shows up somewhere on the table.
Four elements are named after one tiny Swedish village: yttrium, terbium, erbium, and ytterbium all honor Ytterby, where the mineral containing them was first dug up.
Tungsten's symbol is W for its German name, Wolfram — one of several symbols taken from older names, like Ag for silver (argentum) and Pb for lead (plumbum).
Oganesson is one of only two elements named after a person who was alive at the time: Russian physicist Yuri Oganessian. The other is seaborgium, honoring Glenn Seaborg.