Angel Trivia
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110 free Angel trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Angels turn up everywhere: in the Bible and the Quran, in Renaissance paintings, on top of Christmas trees, in baseball, on the A1 outside Gateshead and in Joss Whedon's Los Angeles. This quiz covers all of them. The first half is the religious and mythological angels: where the word comes from, the archangels Gabriel, Michael and Raphael, six-winged seraphim and four-faced cherubim, the nine choirs of Pseudo-Dionysius, guardian angels, Metatron and Lucifer, and Islam's Azrael, Israfil and the grave-questioners Munkar and Nakir. The second half is angels in the wider world: Angel Falls and Jimmie Angel, the Angel of the North, the Los Angeles Angels and Angels in the Outfield, Charlie's Angels, Buffy's Angel and his spin-off, Clarence from It's a Wonderful Life, Robbie Williams's 'Angels', angel food cake, angel sharks, the Blue Angels and the Hells Angels. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia's articles on the angels, places, shows and songs involved, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 110 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'angel' comes from the Greek angelos, which literally means what?
Messenger
Messenger is all it meant: Greek angelos covered human envoys too. The Latin Bible later split the two, keeping angelus for the heavenly kind and nuntius for the rest.
Q 02In the nine-choir hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius, which order of angels ranks highest, closest to God?
Seraphim
Seraphim top the nine choirs, which run in three tiers of three. Archangels, despite the grand name, sit second from the bottom, just above ordinary angels.
Q 03In Isaiah's vision of God's throne, six-winged angels call out which word three times over?
Holy
Holy, holy, holy: the cry became the Sanctus, still sung in the Mass. The angels fly with only two of their six wings and use the others to cover their faces and feet.
Q 04In Ezekiel's vision, a cherub has four faces: a human, a lion, an eagle and which other creature?
An ox
An ox, or calf, completes the set. Christian art later gave the four faces to the Gospel writers, and the ox usually went to Luke, whose Gospel opens with a priest serving in the Temple.
Q 05Which archangel tells Mary she will bear a son in the Gospel of Luke?
Gabriel
Gabriel had already told the priest Zechariah that his elderly wife would bear John the Baptist. When Zechariah doubted him, the angel struck him mute until the birth.
Q 06Which archangel is described as the warrior of God and chief of the heavenly armies?
Michael
Michael leads heaven's armies in the Book of Revelation, where he and his angels fight the dragon and hurl it down to earth. The Book of Daniel calls him the great prince who protects Israel.
Q 07In the Book of Tobit, which archangel poses as a man named Azariah and heals Tobit's blindness with a fish?
Raphael
Raphael, whose name means 'God has healed', tells young Tobias to keep the fish's gall for his father's eyes and to burn its heart and liver, which drives off the demon Asmodeus.
Q 08In the Book of Acts, an angel wakes which chained apostle and leads him out of Herod's prison?
Peter
Peter thinks he is dreaming until he is out in the street. When he knocks at his friends' gate, the servant Rhoda is so overjoyed to hear his voice that she runs off without letting him in.
Q 09In Jewish mysticism, which biblical figure, taken up by God without dying, became the angel Metatron?
Enoch
Enoch 'walked with God, and he was not, for God took him', says Genesis. The mystical book known as 3 Enoch fills the gap: he is carried to heaven and remade as the highest of the angels.
Q 10In Roman folklore, Lucifer, meaning 'light-bringer', was the name for which planet?
Venus
Venus as the morning star was Lucifer to the Romans. The name passed to the devil after the Latin Bible used it in Isaiah 14, where a fallen king is mocked as a star dropped from heaven.
Q 11In ancient Jewish retellings of Genesis 6, which giants are born to fallen angels and human women?
The Nephilim
The Nephilim are fathered by the Watchers, angels who came down to take human wives. In the retelling the giants ravage the earth, and the Flood is sent partly to be rid of them.
Q 12Which medieval theologian, nicknamed the Angelic Doctor, taught that guardian angels come from the lowest order of angels?
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas added that a guardian arrives at birth, not at baptism. The gift, he reasoned, is given to people as rational beings and not only as Christians.
Q 13Which biblical figure's donkey saw the Angel of the Lord blocking the road before he did?
Balaam
Q 21Which sculptor created the Angel of the North in Gateshead?
Antony Gormley
Antony Gormley angled the wings about 3.5 degrees forward instead of leaving them flat. He wanted the huge steel figure to give, in his words, 'a sense of embrace'.
Q 22The Angel of the North stands on a hilltop site once used by which industry?
Coal mining
Coal mining: the mound covers a former colliery's pithead baths. The sculptor said the figure should remind people that miners worked in the dark beneath it for two hundred years.
Q 23Which singing cowboy founded the American League's Angels baseball franchise in 1961?
Gene Autry
Gene Autry only wanted the new club's games for his own radio station. When the first ownership bid fell apart late in 1960, he ended up buying the team himself.
Balaam beat the donkey three times for balking before God let her speak and ask what she had done to deserve it. Only then did he see the angel in the road, sword drawn.
Q 14In Islamic tradition, which archangel is the angel of death, who parts each soul from its body?
Azrael
Azrael, in one telling, has no idea who will die next. He finds out only when a leaf bearing the person's name falls from the tree beneath God's throne.
Q 15In Islamic tradition, the archangel Israfil will announce the Day of Judgment by sounding which instrument?
Trumpet
Trumpet: tradition pictures Israfil with it already at his lips, waiting for God's order to blow. He is never named in the Quran, only in later reports.
Q 16In Islamic belief, how do the angels Munkar and Nakir test the faith of the newly buried?
Question them
The two angels question them about their faith. Those who answer well are left to rest in comfort until the resurrection, and those who cannot are punished.
Q 17According to Joseph Smith, which angel guarded the golden plates that became the Book of Mormon?
Moroni
Moroni, in the book's own story, is the last prophet to write on the plates and the man who buried them. Some 14 centuries later, Smith said, he came back as an angel to show where they lay.
Q 18Which Surrealist painter was so fascinated by Millet's The Angelus that he wrote a whole book about it?
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí argued that the two peasants were not saying the evening prayer but mourning a buried child. Millet said he was only recalling his grandmother, who stopped field work to pray when the church bell rang.
Q 19Angel Falls, the world's tallest uninterrupted waterfall, is in which country?
Venezuela
Venezuela's president Hugo Chávez said in 2009 that the falls should go by a Pemon name, Kerepakupai Merú, arguing that the country's best-known landmark was indigenous land long before any outsider saw it.
Q 20What was the profession of Jimmie Angel, the American whose name was given to Angel Falls?
Aviator
Aviator. In 1937 Jimmie Angel landed his plane on the mesa above the falls, where its wheels sank into soft ground, and he, his wife and two companions spent 11 days walking out.
Q 24Which child actor played Roger, the boy who sees the angels, in Angels in the Outfield (1994)?
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Joseph Gordon-Levitt was 13 when the film came out. The team around him hid future stars in small roles as ballplayers, among them Matthew McConaughey and Adrien Brody.
Q 25Which Charlie's Angels actress quit as a regular after one season, while her swimsuit poster sold in the millions?
Farrah Fawcett
Farrah Fawcett's exit brought a breach-of-contract lawsuit from the show's producers. To settle it she agreed to come back for guest episodes spread over two later seasons.
Q 26In Charlie's Angels, how did the unseen boss Charlie Townsend give his detectives their assignments?
Via a speakerphone
Via a speakerphone: John Forsythe recorded Charlie's lines in a sound studio and never came to the set, so he hardly ever met the actresses who played his Angels.
Q 27In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the vampire Angel was cursed with a soul by whom?
A Romani clan
A Romani clan restored his soul as punishment for murdering one of their own. The curse works through conscience: after more than a century of killing, he is left to feel guilt for all of it.
Q 28In which city is the Buffy spin-off series Angel set?
Los Angeles
Los Angeles is where he heads once his doomed romance with Buffy has to end. He sets up there as a private detective, looking for redemption one case at a time.
Q 29Which former Sunnydale cheerleader joins Angel's detective agency in the spin-off's first season?
Cordelia Chase
Cordelia Chase arrives hoping to become an actress and ends up running the agency's office. When her half-demon colleague Doyle dies, he passes on to her his visions of people in danger.
Q 30What is the name of George Bailey's guardian angel in It's a Wonderful Life?
Clarence Odbody
Clarence Odbody, an angel second class, has gone 200 years without earning his wings. Saving George finally wins them, and a bell ringing on the family's Christmas tree announces it.