21st Birthday
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
40 free 21st Birthday trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Turning 21 is the last of the big coming-of-age birthdays. In the United States it is the day the bar finally says yes, and in much of the English-speaking world it was long treated as the true start of adult life, so it tends to come with a party, a toast and a certain amount of teasing. This quiz is built for that party. A good share of it plays with the number itself: the card table, the parade ground, the pop charts, the periodic table and the places where twenty-one turns up when nobody expects it. Other questions ask what well-known people had already done by the age of 21, and a final group covers the cocktails, spirits and toasts that a new 21-year-old is suddenly allowed to order. The questions are written for a mixed room of friends and family, with plenty that everyone can get and a few to argue over, and each answer comes with a short explanation worth reading aloud. Play it on a phone, split the guests into teams, or print it as a party game for the birthday girl or boy.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which British singer named her 2011 album 21 after her age while she was making it?
Adele
Adele followed her debut 19 with 21, which topped charts in more than 30 countries and won the 2012 Grammy for Album of the Year.
Q 02Which casino card game, the most widely played banking game in the world, is also known as twenty-one?
Blackjack
Blackjack players try to get closer to 21 than the dealer without going over; its British cousin, pontoon, probably takes its name from a garbled vingt-et-un.
Q 03At which Arlington National Cemetery monument does a sentinel march exactly 21 steps, then pause for 21 seconds?
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier guards count in 21s to echo the 21-gun salute, the highest military honour, and the round-the-clock watch has not stopped since 1937, whatever the weather.
Q 04Which future queen marked her 21st birthday in 1947 with a radio pledge of lifelong service from southern Africa?
Elizabeth II
Elizabeth II was on her first overseas tour, travelling with her parents, when she promised the Commonwealth that her whole life would be given to its service.
Q 05In which city was Atlanta rapper 21 Savage born, years before US immigration agents detained him in 2019?
London
London is where he was born Shéyaa Bin Abraham-Joseph, to British parents, in the Plaistow district; he moved to Atlanta with his mother at the age of seven.
Q 06Which 21-year-old co-founded Apple on April Fools' Day 1976, alongside an engineer known to friends as Woz?
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs had turned 21 just five weeks earlier; a third co-founder formally withdrew from the partnership after only twelve days.
Q 07Which 1930s child star gives her name to a non-alcoholic mix of ginger ale and grenadine, topped with a cherry?
Shirley Temple
Shirley Temple was no fan of her namesake drink: she told an interviewer in 1986 that it was far too sweet and that she had nothing to do with creating it.
Q 08Which gaming piece carries exactly 21 pips in total, with opposite sides that always add up to seven?
A standard die
A standard die shows one to six pips on its faces, which total 21; a die with opposite sides adding up to seven was unearthed at Mohenjo-daro, about 4,000 years old.
Q 09Which famous whiskey is distilled in Lynchburg, Tennessee, a small town that sits in a dry county?
Jack Daniel's
Jack Daniel's is made in Moore County, where Tennessee's own prohibition laws outlasted the national repeal of 1933 and kept the distillery shut until 1938.
Q 10Which war's draft of 18-year-olds drove the 1971 amendment that lowered the US voting age from 21?
Vietnam War
Vietnam War conscripts could be sent to fight at 18 yet could not vote until 21; the states ratified the Twenty-sixth Amendment little more than three months after Congress proposed it.
Q 11Which president signed the law that cut highway funding for any state letting under-21s buy alcohol?
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan signed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act in July 1984; a state that held out stood to lose 10 percent of its federal highway money.
Q 12In which country is downing a yardie, a yard-long glass of beer, a traditional 21st birthday challenge?
New Zealand
New Zealand party guests watch the birthday boy or girl take on a glass about a yard long, whose bulb at the bottom can send a sudden rush of beer over the drinker.
Q 13In British bingo, callers name 21 after which object, a nod to the traditional age of majority?
A door key
Q 21Which country gave the world the mojito, a mix of white rum, lime juice, sugar, soda water and mint?
Cuba
Cuba's classic recipe calls for the mint leaves to be bruised, never shredded, which is enough to release their essential oils into the drink.
Q 22Which cocktail of vodka, ginger beer and lime juice is properly served in a copper mug?
Moscow mule
Moscow mule is an American drink: by the best-known account it was devised in Manhattan in 1941 by a Smirnoff boss and a Hollywood restaurateur with ginger beer to sell.
Q 23Which pink cocktail of vodka, Cointreau, cranberry and lime did Carrie Bradshaw regularly order on Sex and the City?
Cosmopolitan
A door key stands for coming of age, because 21 was long the age of majority in Britain; bingo's other nickname for the number is the royal salute.
Q 14Which actor became a teen idol as an undercover police officer in the Fox series 21 Jump Street?
Johnny Depp
Johnny Depp found the teen-idol status irritating but stayed on under contract, and he came back for a cameo in the 2012 film version.
Q 15Which punk trio released the 2009 power ballad 21 Guns on the album 21st Century Breakdown?
Green Day
Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong said the title nods both to the album and to the 21-gun salute fired for someone who has fallen.
Q 16Which golfer won the 1997 Masters by 12 strokes at the age of 21, his first major title?
Tiger Woods
Tiger Woods played his first nine holes in a shaky 40, then pulled clear of runner-up Tom Kite to become the youngest winner the tournament had seen.
Q 17Which Jamaican sprinter was 21 when he won the 100 and 200 metres in world-record times at the 2008 Olympics?
Usain Bolt
Usain Bolt won the 200 metres in Beijing just hours before turning 22, and the stadium played Happy Birthday over its sound system after the race.
Q 18Which Cambridge physicist was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at 21 and given only two years to live?
Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking lived for more than 50 years after the diagnosis, long enough to write A Brief History of Time and to reach the age of 76.
Q 19Which Mexican spirit must be made from blue agave, mostly grown around a Jalisco town of the same name?
Tequila
Tequila is set apart from mezcal, the wider family of agave spirits, by that single permitted plant; the agave fields around the town became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2006.
Q 20Which cocktail, whose name is Spanish for daisy, is often served in a glass rimmed with salt?
Margarita
Margarita's first known printed recipe under that name ran in a 1953 issue of Esquire, though a newspaper editor had described finding such a drink in Tijuana back in 1936.
Cosmopolitan has rival origin stories; in one, a bartender splashed cranberry juice into a Kamikaze and the first taster's reaction gave the drink its name.
Q 24Which Irish stout's founder signed a 9,000-year lease on a disused Dublin brewery on the last day of 1759?
Guinness
Guinness paid just 45 pounds a year under that lease for the St James's Gate site, which went on to become one of the largest breweries in the British Empire.
Q 25Which spirit, descended from the Dutch drink jenever, takes its main flavour from juniper berries?
Gin
Gin caught on in England after Dutch jenever arrived, and juniper drinks go back further still: monks were making a juniper tonic wine by around 1055.
Q 26In which country do drinkers raise a glass with the toast kanpai, which literally means empty the glass?
Japan
Japan shares the toast's two written characters with its neighbours: Mandarin speakers read them as ganbei, and Koreans say geonbae.
Q 27Card-counting students from which university inspired the 2008 film 21, which could not be shot on its campus?
MIT
MIT refused to allow filming on campus, so its classrooms, dorm rooms and gymnasium were all played by Boston University.
Q 28Which playwright's drama All My Sons, about faulty warplane parts, inspired the band name Twenty One Pilots?
Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller's 1947 play turns on cracked engine parts sold to the Air Force, which cause the deaths of 21 airmen; singer Tyler Joseph took the name from it.
Q 29Which band's 1978 hit September opens by asking listeners whether they recall the 21st of that month?
Earth, Wind & Fire
Earth, Wind & Fire singer Maurice White said he picked the 21st simply for how it sounded when sung, though his wife later said it was their son's due date.
Q 30In which Gilbert and Sullivan opera must leap-day baby Frederic serve as an apprentice until his 21st birthday?
The Pirates of Penzance
The Pirates of Penzance hero was born on 29 February, so by the letter of his contract he will not reach that birthday until he is in his eighties.