How many interlocking rings are on the Olympic flag?

How to get close to this number

Everyone can picture this flag, so rebuild the answer from the image rather than recalling a number. Three rings on top and two below, interlocking — counting a symbol you have seen thousands of times is more reliable than retrieving a fact about it.

The meaning is the continents, and the explanation gives the list: the Americas are counted as one, which is why there are five rather than six. Continental counts vary by convention — some traditions count five continents, some six, some seven — and the flag encodes one particular convention from the early twentieth century.

The myth in the explanation is worth correcting because it is repeated constantly: the individual colours were never assigned to specific continents. The colours were chosen because together with the white background they included at least one colour from every national flag then in existence, which is a much better piece of design thinking than the myth suggests.