Interactive test · one minute

How do you draw a circle?

In 2017 people in 190 countries and territories drew a circle, a square, a triangle and a star for a Google game, and Google published the drawings line by line, with the country each player was in. Draw the four shapes yourself. The page shows how often each was drawn the same way as yours (from the same point, in the same direction, with as many lines), and where.

Draw a circle

Finger, mouse or pen, whichever is handiest. It does not have to look good.

Your drawings stay in this tab. The page sends nothing anywhere.

How you drew

Your results appear here once you have drawn all four shapes.

The circle: Japan goes the other way

Of the circles drawn in a single line, 84% went anticlockwise, and 85% started in the upper part. In Japan it is the reverse: 81% of circles go clockwise, most of them starting at the bottom. In Taiwan, 58%. In Romania, 15% of 808 circles.

One-line circles drawn clockwise, by country. Countries with at least 300 recognised drawings of the shape; the top eight, Romania and the last two are shown. The vertical line is the average over all drawings.

Quartz described the difference in the same data in 2017; the analysis here reproduces it. Why it happens is not settled. The data only shows that the habit differs with where people played from, not why.

The square: some write it like a character

The Chinese character 口 ("mouth") is a square, and children learn it in three lines: the left side top to bottom, then the top and right side in one movement, then the base, left to right. The same square, in the same order, appears in 21% of squares drawn in Taiwan and Hong Kong and in 0.7% of those from countries that write in the Latin alphabet.

Squares drawn in the stroke order of 口, by country. Countries with at least 300 recognised drawings of the shape; the top eight, Romania and the last two are shown. The vertical line is the average over all drawings.

In Japan, where Chinese characters (kanji) are taught at school, and in South Korea, where they can be studied as an elective (hanja), the order turns up in about one square in ten. In Romania, 0.5%. The data show how often this order turns up in each country's squares; which players learned to write characters cannot be known.

The triangle: from the top, to the left

Most triangles start either at the bottom-left corner or at the apex. In Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, between 58% and 62% of triangles start at the apex, head down to the left and close without the hand lifting. In Romania, 25%; across Latin-alphabet countries, 25%.

Triangles started at the apex and drawn leftwards in one line, by country. Countries with at least 300 recognised drawings of the shape; the top eight, Romania and the last two are shown. The vertical line is the average over all drawings.

The star: five lines or an outline

A star can be drawn as a path of five crossing straight lines, or as an outline that goes round the points. In the US, 63% of stars were drawn in a single line that crosses itself, that is, as five straight lines. In Germany, 27%; in France, 23%; in Israel, only 15%. In Romania, 45%.

Stars drawn in one line that crosses itself (five straight lines), by country. Countries with at least 300 recognised drawings of the shape; the top eight, Romania and the last two are shown. The vertical line is the average over all drawings.

What the page cannot tell

It cannot guess where you are from. The files do not link drawings to players, so there is no way to know whether one person drew several shapes. So the page compares each shape on its own and never adds them up into a single verdict.
The country in the data is where the game was played from, not the player's nationality.
The drawings are from 2017 and include only those the game recognised. The data do not record whether people drew with a mouse, a finger or a stylus.
The page does not check that you really drew the shape asked for. It compares only how you drew the lines: starting point, direction and how many.
Nobody has to draw the way their country draws. The percentages describe habits, not rules.

Method

The data are the four "simplified" files of the Quick, Draw! data set: 118,808 circles, 120,538 squares, 120,500 triangles and 132,814 stars that the game recognised. Each drawing is a list of lines, each line a list of points in the order they were drawn.
Your drawing goes through the same simplification as the data set: moved to the top corner, scaled to 255 units, then simplified (Ramer–Douglas–Peucker, tolerance 2). Checked on 10,000 drawings from the set: each gets exactly the label it has in the analysis.
For a shape drawn in one line, the page records the starting point (one of eight, from its angle to the centre of the drawing), the direction (from the signed area of the outline) and, for the star, whether the line crosses itself at least three times (five-line star) or not (outline). For several lines it records how many; for the square it also recognises the stroke order of 口 (left side down, then one line that goes across the top and down the right side, then the base rightwards, each checked against its position in the drawing). "Latin-alphabet countries" is an explicit list of countries that write mainly in that alphabet day to day; countries with several scripts, such as India or Greece, are left out. Unknown or withdrawn country codes are not counted.
Country comparisons use only countries with at least 300 drawings of the shape. The example drawings shown next to yours are real drawings from the set, made the same way, picked from different countries.

Sources

Google Creative Lab, The Quick, Draw! Dataset, 2017, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. The "simplified" files for circle, square, triangle and star.
Thu-Huong Ha and Nikhil Sonnad, "How do you draw a circle? We analyzed 100,000 drawings to show how culture shapes our instincts", Quartz, 2017.