Alphabet Trivia
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98 free Alphabet trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
43 free alphabet trivia questions with answers. The alphabet you are reading has a 4,000-year backstory, and this quiz covers all of it. Expect questions on the Phoenician abjad and the Greek invention of vowels, the Latin alphabet's rise, the 26 English letters and why U and J are latecomers, the NATO phonetic alphabet from Alfa to Zulu, letter frequency (E is king, Z is last), the ampersand, pangrams, braille, Morse code, Hangul and Cyrillic. Easy questions ask how many letters English has and what a pangram is. The hard ones want the saints behind the Glagolitic alphabet, the sarcophagus with the oldest Phoenician text and the word 'acrophony'. It suits a language-lover's quiz, a classroom or a pub round. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on alphabets and writing systems, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which letter of the English alphabet is named for the way it was first written?
W
W: Old English scribes first wrote the sound as 'uu', a doubled u, and the name double-u stuck long after the pair had fused into a single letter.
Q 02The terms 'upper case' and 'lower case' come from the trays used by which tradesmen to store their letters?
Printers
Printers: compositors kept their metal type in two shallow trays, or cases, with the capitals in the upper one on the sloped work-table and the small letters within easier reach below.
Q 03The Greek letter names alpha and beta derive from Phoenician words for what?
Ox and house
Ox and house: aleph is thought to have begun as a little drawing of an ox's head and bet as the plan of a house, and each sign took the first sound of the word it pictured.
Q 04Which country dropped its Arabic-based script for a new Latin alphabet in 1928?
Turkey
Turkey: the switch was one of Ataturk's reforms and took effect in November 1928, ending centuries of writing Turkish in the Perso-Arabic script.
Q 05What is an abjad, like the Phoenician or Arabic script?
An alphabet that writes only consonants
An alphabet that writes only consonants: readers supply the vowels from context, much as an English speaker can still make out 'bldg' or 'txt msg'.
Q 06Which script was the first to give vowels their own independent letters?
Greek
Greek: the borrowed Phoenician signs included consonants the language did not have, so the Greeks reused five of them for vowels, turning the throat-catch aleph into alpha, the letter A.
Q 07What is the small dot above a lowercase i or j called?
A tittle
A tittle: the word has meant a tiny pen-stroke since the 14th century, and the King James Bible's 'one jot or one tittle' made it a byword for the smallest detail.
Q 08The Latin script evolved most directly from which earlier neighbouring script?
Etruscan
Etruscan: Rome took its letters from its northern neighbours before 600 BC, and early Latin wrote both k and g sounds with C, probably an Etruscan habit, until G was added centuries later.
Q 09Which letter's name literally means 'little O'?
Omicron
Omicron: the Greeks told their two O sounds apart as 'o mikron', the small or short one, and 'o mega', the great one, which is how the last letter of their alphabet got its name too.
Q 10Which letter is the most commonly used in English?
E
E makes up about one letter in eight, and Linotype machines laid out their keys by frequency, so a finger run down the first two columns typed the nonsense line 'etaoin shrdlu'.
Q 11Which letter turns up least often in ordinary English text?
Z
Z makes up fewer than one letter in a thousand of ordinary English prose, and Scrabble, whose tile values follow letter frequency, pays for the rarity: a set has a single Z, worth ten points.
Q 12Which two letters of the modern English alphabet began as variant shapes of V and I?
U and J
U and J: for centuries each pair was one letter doing duty as both vowel and consonant, and J was not fully accepted as a letter in its own right until the 17th century.
Q 13What is a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet called?
A pangram
A pangram earns its keep as a drill: because it holds every letter, writing teachers of the 1880s set one as copy for their pupils, and typists and font designers still use them.
Q 21Who invented the raised-dot reading system for the blind, at age 15?
Louis Braille
Louis Braille was blinded at three while playing with tools in his father's workshop, and he never saw his system win: his own school adopted it only in 1854, two years after his death.
Q 22Each character in the raised-dot reading system for the blind uses a cell of how many dots?
Six
Six dots, in two columns of three, give 63 different characters, enough for the system's inventor, an organist himself, to adapt it to musical notation as well as letters and numbers.
Q 23The telegraph code used to send text over wires encodes letters as which two signals?
Dots and dashes
Q 14Which is the best-known sentence using every letter?
'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog'
'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' was already a classroom favourite in 1885, when a Boston newspaper noted that writing teachers set it because it holds every letter.
Q 15Today's code word is Echo; in the wartime 'Able Baker' alphabet, which word stood for E?
Easy
Easy: the American alphabet of 1941 began Able, Baker and gave E this word, which is why the paratroopers of E Company in Band of Brothers are remembered as Easy Company.
Q 16Which code word stands for the letter Z in the NATO alphabet?
Zulu
Zulu: the time zone on the Greenwich meridian is lettered Z, so pilots and navies call Coordinated Universal Time 'Zulu time'; in the wartime alphabet the word for Z had been Zebra.
Q 17For whose benefit does the NATO alphabet spell 'Alfa' with an f and 'Juliett' with a double t?
Non-English speakers
Non-English speakers: a French reader might leave a single final t silent and others would not read 'ph' as f, so the spellings were bent until everyone said the words the same way.
Q 18Despite its name, the NATO phonetic alphabet was finalised in the 1950s by which organisation?
The International Civil Aviation Organization
The International Civil Aviation Organization settled the words after comprehension tests on speakers of 31 nationalities, and NATO's forces took up the same list, which is how it got its popular name.
Q 19The ampersand '&' began as a joined-up way of writing which Latin word?
Et
Et: Roman scribes ran together the two letters of their word for 'and', and in some typefaces, italics above all, you can still pick out the E and the t.
Q 20The word 'ampersand' is a corruption of which phrase?
'and per se and'
'And per se and': children reciting their letters ended '... X, Y, Z and per se and', meaning that & by itself stands for 'and', because the sign was taught as a last character after Z.
Dots and dashes: the distress call SOS stands for nothing at all and was chosen because three dots, three dashes and three dots are simple to send and hard to mistake.
Q 24After which painter turned inventor is the telegraph code of the 1830s named?
Samuel Morse
Samuel Morse worked out the code with his assistant Alfred Vail, who went on improving it, and in 1844 the pair opened their first long line, from Washington to Baltimore.
Q 25Which Korean king created the Hangul alphabet in the 1440s?
Sejong the Great
Sejong the Great published it in 1446 under a title meaning 'the correct sounds for the instruction of the people'; the name Hangul was coined only in the 20th century.
Q 26The basic consonant letters of Hangul were designed to picture what?
The speech organs making each sound
The speech organs making each sound: five basic shapes sketch the tongue, mouth, teeth and throat in position, and harsher sounds are built by adding lines to them.
Q 27Which script did Korea use before Hangul was created?
Chinese characters (Hanja)
Chinese characters (Hanja) kept their hold long after the alphabet arrived: for centuries most Koreans who could write went on using classical Chinese and left the new letters to the less schooled.
Q 28The Cyrillic script is used to write which language?
Russian
Russian is only the best known: the script writes more than fifty languages, carried far beyond the Slavs to Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Tajik in Central Asia.
Q 29The Cyrillic script became the third official script of the EU when which country joined in 2007?
Bulgaria
Bulgaria's entry is why euro banknotes of the second series spell the currency three ways, adding a Cyrillic version to the two that were already there.
Q 30Which pair of missionary brothers is credited with creating Glagolitic, the first Slavic alphabet?
Cyril and Methodius
Cyril and Methodius devised Glagolitic for their mission to the Slavs in the 860s; the better-known script that carries one brother's name was worked out later by their followers.