Antiques
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50 free Antiques trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every antique is a small mystery. Who made it, what was it for, and why does one chipped teapot sell for a fortune while another goes for pennies? Answering those questions is half the fun of collecting, and it is what this quiz is about. The questions range across the things people inherit, buy and argue over: furniture and the cabinetmakers behind famous styles, porcelain and pottery, silver and its stamps, glassware, timepieces, toys and the curious household objects our great-grandparents used every day. A few cover the trade itself, from auction rooms to the words dealers use when they talk about age and ownership. It is written for fans of television valuation shows, weekend browsers of antique shops and anyone with a family heirloom on the mantelpiece. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave knowing a little more about what might be sitting in your own attic.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which American Revolution hero was a Boston silversmith who took up dentistry to make ends meet?
Paul Revere
Paul Revere went back to his silver shop after the war and in 1800 became the first American to roll copper into sheets for sheathing naval ships.
Q 02Which radioactive element makes antique Vaseline glass glow bright green under ultraviolet light?
Uranium
Uranium, first identified by a German chemist in 1789, was colouring decorative glass by the 1830s. The Vaseline nickname came later, from its likeness to petroleum jelly.
Q 03Which London cabinetmaker's pattern book, the Director, turned his surname into a furniture style?
Thomas Chippendale
Thomas Chippendale issued the catalogue in 1754, and it spread so widely that similar furniture by other makers came to be called by his name.
Q 04Which country's name became an English verb for coating furniture in glossy black imitation lacquer?
Japan
Japan gave English the word japanning in the 17th century, when European craftsmen copied the then-famous Japanese lacquer with resin varnishes instead of true tree sap.
Q 05Which Saint Petersburg jeweller made Easter eggs for Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II to give as gifts?
Fabergé
Fabergé delivered 50 Imperial eggs from 1885 to 1916, each one an Easter gift from a tsar to his wife or his mother.
Q 06Which BBC series, first shown in 1979, has experts value the public's old treasures and inspired a PBS version?
Antiques Roadshow
Antiques Roadshow grew out of a 1977 documentary, and Boston's WGBH licensed the format from the BBC to launch the American edition in 1997.
Q 07Which carved jewel with a raised portrait shares its name with a star's brief appearance in a film?
Cameo
Cameo first meant a gem carved in raised relief, and the screen sense grew out of its use for a short literary portrait. An intaglio is the reverse, with the image cut into the stone.
Q 08By the customary definition, which also asks for original condition, how old must an antique be?
100 years
100 years is the usual threshold for an antique, though motor vehicles are an exception: some definitions let a car qualify after as little as 25.
Q 09Which Chinese dynasty, whose Yongle Emperor built the Forbidden City, is renowned for blue and white porcelain?
Ming
Ming emperors ran imperial kilns at Jingdezhen, a city sometimes called the porcelain capital of China, and production has continued there to this day.
Q 10Which designer's New York studio made leaded stained-glass lamps, many now credited to his employee Clara Driscoll?
Louis Comfort Tiffany
Louis Comfort Tiffany was the son of the founder of the jeweller Tiffany & Co., and for over a century he was given the credit for shades that Driscoll designed.
Q 11Which auction house, founded in London by a bookseller in 1744, is the slightly older rival of Christie's?
Sotheby's
Sotheby's was started by bookseller Samuel Baker 22 years before James Christie held his first London sale, and the firm later put its headquarters in New York City.
Q 12Which Cremona craftsman's violins are known by the Latin form of his surname and often sell for millions?
Antonio Stradivari
Antonio Stradivari marked many of his labels Cremonensis, meaning 'of Cremona', and players shorten the name of his instruments to Strad.
Q 13Which German region popularised the cuckoo clock and exported it worldwide, although it was not invented there?
Black Forest
Q 21Which name is given to silver that is 92.5 percent pure, the standard often stamped as 925 on jewellery?
Sterling
Sterling was another name for the English silver penny, so the phrase first meant metal fit for making those coins. The other 7.5 percent is usually copper.
Q 22Hallmarks on British silver are named after the London hall of which guild, where metal was tested?
Goldsmiths
Hallmark comes from Goldsmiths' Hall, and the oldest English mark is the leopard's head that a statute of Edward I ordered stamped on tested silver in 1300.
Q 23Which term, from the French for 'to come from', means an antique's documented chain of past owners?
Provenance
Provenance does double duty: a recorded line of past owners adds value, and tracing it is also one of the ways experts authenticate an object.
Black Forest makers came late to the bird call: an Augsburg merchant described a cuckoo clock in 1629, decades before clockmaking was established in the region.
Q 14Which English potter, whose grandson was Charles Darwin, created jasperware in the pale blue that now bears his name?
Josiah Wedgwood
Josiah Wedgwood's daughter Susannah married Robert Darwin and became the mother of the naturalist, who went on to marry another of the potter's grandchildren, Emma.
Q 15Which word, first used of a year's grape harvest, do dealers use for items too young to be antiques?
Vintage
Vintage first described the wine made from one year's grapes. In fashion it usually means more than 20 years old, while retro describes new goods made in an older style.
Q 16Which celibate American sect, nicknamed for ecstatic worship, made plain ladder-back chairs collectors prize?
Shakers
Shakers were first known as the 'Shaking Quakers', and the rarest pieces of their furniture have sold at auction for sums in the mid six figures.
Q 17Which island did Venice order its glassmakers to move to in 1291, making it Europe's main glass producer?
Murano
Murano took the furnaces because Venice feared fire, since most of the city's buildings were then made of wood.
Q 18Which sleek interwar style, seen in New York's Chrysler Building, took its name from a 1925 Paris exhibition?
Art Deco
Art Deco is short for Arts Décoratifs, and in its own day the look went by names such as style moderne instead of the label used now.
Q 19Heirloom began as a term of English inheritance law, and its ending 'loom' originally meant what kind of object?
A tool
A tool is what loom first meant, and in English law an heirloom was a movable possession that long custom tied to a family estate, so it passed with the land.
Q 20Which word for the mellow surface age gives old furniture also names the green layer on the Statue of Liberty?
Patina
Patina once alarmed Congress, which voted money to paint the statue until Army engineers found that the green layer was protecting the copper beneath.
Q 24Which Dutch city, home of the painter Johannes Vermeer, gave its name to blue and white tin-glazed pottery?
Delft
Delft potters turned to copying Chinese porcelain after 1620, when the death of the Wanli Emperor interrupted the supply reaching Europe.
Q 25Which lidded metal antique with a handle was filled with hot embers and slid under the bedcovers on cold nights?
Warming pan
Warming pan use ran from the mid-17th century to the early 20th, and the embers dried out damp bedding as well as taking off the chill.
Q 26Which grey alloy, made mostly of tin, was a leading material for plates and cups before porcelain spread?
Pewter
Pewter once contained as much as 40 percent lead, and most modern versions are made without it to prevent lead poisoning.
Q 27Which collectors' name covers the cheap coloured tableware that Quaker Oats packed inside food boxes?
Depression glass
Depression glass was machine-made and given away free or sold cheaply, and some movie theaters handed pieces to their patrons.
Q 28Which wooden kitchen antique was worked by pumping a staff called a dasher up and down?
Butter churn
Butter churn dashers went by a string of regional names, including plunger, plumper and kirn-staff, kirn being a Scots word for churn.
Q 29Which lockable drawing-room box held an Asian import so costly that the mistress of the house prepared it?
Tea caddy
Tea caddy is believed to come from catty, a Chinese pound of about a pound and a third, and until about 1800 the boxes were simply called canisters.
Q 30Which English textile and wallpaper designer, also a poet and socialist, led the British Arts and Crafts movement?
William Morris
William Morris turned to wallpaper in 1862 with a pattern called Trellis, and his firm went on to shape the look of British interiors for decades.