Terms & Credits

The original writing on this site — every tower description, the “did you know” facts, the quiz, Map Hunt and Rank It questions, and the text of these pages — is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 licence.

In practice: use it in a classroom, a school project, a homework club or a personal blog, with credit and a link back. For commercial use — anything you sell, or that runs advertising, or that promotes a business — please ask first. Get in touch and the answer may well be yes.

That licence covers the words only. The software this site is built from — its source code, layout and design — is not offered for reuse, and all rights in it are reserved.

Every building photograph comes from Wikimedia Commons and belongs to the photographer who took it, not to this site. Each one is credited by name on the tower's card, next to the licence it was published under — mostly CC BY and CC BY-SA, with some in the public domain.

Those licences are the photographers' own and they do allow commercial use. The non-commercial term above cannot and does not apply to them. If you want to reuse a photograph, follow that photograph's licence: click the photographer's name on any card to reach the original file, where the full terms are set out.

The extra photographs in some towers' photo albums come from Unsplash and are used under the Unsplash licence.

Heights, floor counts, completion years and locations are facts. Nobody owns a fact, and nothing on this page tries to change that — take them and use them however you like. The numbers come from each building's Wikipedia entry and follow the CTBUH convention, which is explained on the About page.

Map tiles are Esri's World Topo Map, shown with Esri's attribution in the corner of every map. They are provided under Esri's own terms, not these, and nothing here grants you any right to use them.

There are no accounts, no sign-in and no contact forms. The site sets no cookies and stores nothing at all in your browser — no saved data of any kind. Your quiz score lives in the page while you play and is gone the moment you close the tab. Nothing about you is sold or shared, and nothing here can identify you or recognise you if you come back.

Netlify, which hosts the site, times how quickly each page loads and how much it jumps about while it is loading. Along with those timings it records which page was measured, your browser's name, whether you are on Windows, a Mac, Android, an iPhone or Linux, and the size of your browser window. That is the whole list. It is about the page, not about you: there is no name, no account, no identifier and nothing saved on your device, so one reader cannot be told from another or recognised on a second visit. It is there so slow pages can be found and fixed.

Two more things are worth knowing. Photographs load from Wikimedia and map tiles from Esri, so those two services see the request your browser makes for an image, as they would on any site that shows their content.

The site is offered as it is, for free, with no warranty of any kind. The figures are checked carefully against published sources, but buildings get remeasured and sources disagree — don't rely on anything here for purposes beyond education. If you spot a mistake, please say so; corrections are genuinely welcome.

For corrections, commercial-use requests, or if you are a photographer who would like a credit changed or a photograph removed, get in touch and it will be dealt with promptly.