Arabic Trivia
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100 free Arabic trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Arabic is spoken by around 380 million people, written right to left in a 28-letter script, and split between a formal standard everyone learns at school and dozens of dialects that can be mutually unintelligible. This quiz covers the language itself: the alphabet and its dots, how words are built from three-letter roots, the difference between Egyptian, Levantine and Maghrebi Arabic, and the surprising number of English words (algebra, coffee, mattress, sofa) that arrived from Arabic. It works for language learners, teachers introducing the Arab world, or a general trivia night that wants something beyond capital cities. Early questions are accessible to anyone; the later ones reach into the grammarians of the 8th century, the Nahda, and the story of the Namara inscription. Every answer was checked against the Wikipedia articles on Arabic, the Arabic alphabet and Arabic numerals, and each question links to the sentence that supports it.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Arabic belongs to which language family?
Afroasiatic
Afroasiatic also takes in Hebrew, Amharic, Nigeria's Hausa and ancient Egyptian, so Arabic is a distant cousin of the language of the pharaohs.
Q 02Arabic runs right to left, but which part of a line is still written left to right?
Numbers
Numbers keep their biggest digit on the left, as in English, so a line of Arabic with a date or a price in it changes direction and back again.
Q 03Which letter comes first in the Arabic alphabet?
Alif
Alif is thought to have begun as a drawing of an ox's head, the same sign the Greeks turned into alpha and the Romans into A, so the Arabic and English alphabets open with one ancient letter.
Q 04What is the term for a writing system like Arabic's, whose letters mainly record consonants?
An abjad
An abjad spells out consonants and leaves readers to supply short vowels from context; Arabic's vowel marks are saved mainly for the Quran, children's books and learners' texts.
Q 05In Arabic names, what does 'ibn' or 'bin' mean?
Son of
Son of is what ibn or bin means; the reverse exists too: abu, 'father of', lets a man go by his child's name, as Mahmoud Abbas is known as Abu Mazen.
Q 06Which of these is, like Arabic, one of the six official languages of the United Nations?
Russian
Russian has been official since 1946; Arabic became the sixth and last in 1973, and a delegate who speaks in any of the six is interpreted live into the other five.
Q 07Which UN agency has celebrated World Arabic Language Day every 18 December since 2012?
UNESCO
UNESCO picked 18 December because on that day in 1973 the General Assembly voted to make Arabic the United Nations' sixth official language.
Q 08Which of these languages is written today in a script adapted from Arabic's?
Urdu
Urdu is written in an adapted Arabic script, while its close relative Hindi uses Devanagari; Turkish was written in Arabic letters too until the republic switched to the Latin alphabet in 1928.
Q 09Which European language shows the heaviest Arabic influence, thanks to centuries of Al-Andalus?
Spanish
Spanish took a large stock of words from Arabic; even ojalá, 'hopefully', began as an Arabic phrase about God willing it.
Q 10Which of these English words is of Arabic origin?
Algebra
Algebra comes from al-jabr, 'restoration', in the title of al-Khwarizmi's 9th-century treatise; the Arabic word also covered setting broken bones, and English first used algebra for bone-setting.
Q 11Which of these everyday English words came from Arabic?
Mattress
Mattress goes back to the Arabic maṭraḥ, 'a place where something is thrown down': a cushion or rug tossed on the floor to lie on.
Q 12What do Arabic speakers call classical and modern standard Arabic, meaning "the eloquent"?
Al-fuṣḥā
Al-fuṣḥā covers both the Quran's Arabic and a modern newsreader's: 'Classical' and 'Modern Standard' is a split Western linguists draw, and Arabic speakers generally do not.
Q 13What is the term for using two varieties of one language in different social settings, as in Arabic?
Diglossia
Educated Arabs speak their school-taught standard plus a native dialect, and switch between them, sometimes mid-sentence.
Q 21Whose al-Kitāb was the first comprehensive description of the Arabic language?
Sibawayhi
Sibawayhi was not an Arab by birth, yet his al-Kitāb, simply 'The Book', became the founding text of Arabic grammar.
Q 22The Arabic word kitāb means 'book', so what is a maktaba?
A library
A library: the prefix ma- marks a place, so a maktaba is a place of books. Both words grow from the root k-t-b, as most Arabic words grow from three consonants set into vowel patterns.
Q 23Standard Arabic lacks which English consonant, often replaced with a 'b'?
P
P has no letter in the standard Arabic alphabet, so borrowed names swap it for a b: Paul is Būlus in Arabic.
Q 14Which spoken dialect is among the most widely understood in the Arab world, thanks to its films and TV?
Egyptian Arabic
Around 67 million people speak it in Egypt alone.
Q 15Which North African dialect is hardest for Arabic speakers from the Levant and the Gulf to understand?
Moroccan
Moroccan Arabic is hard for eastern speakers to follow, yet the gap runs one way: Moroccans usually understand the best-known eastern dialects, which reach them through popular media.
Q 16Maghrebi Arabic, spoken across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, is also known by what name?
Darija
Darija means roughly 'everyday' or 'popular' speech, the name North Africans give their dialects to set them apart from formal, written Arabic.
Q 17Which everyday Arabic word means 'come on' or 'let's go'?
Yalla
Yalla is a squeezed-down yā Allāh, 'O God', and it travels well: Hebrew and Turkish slang have both borrowed it.
Q 18Most Arabic letters change shape depending on what?
Their position in a word
Their position in a word matters because Arabic is always written joined-up, even in print, so most letters have one form for the start, one for the middle, one for the end and one for standing alone.
Q 19The collection that gave us Aladdin and Sinbad is called Alf Layla wa-Layla in Arabic, so what does 'layla' mean?
Night
Night: the title is literally 'a thousand nights and a night'. Aladdin himself was in no Arabic original; a French translator added his tale in the 1700s after hearing it from a Syrian storyteller.
Q 20Which Gulf state's name means 'the two seas' in Arabic?
Bahrain
Bahrain is baḥr, 'sea', with the ending -ayn, the dual form Arabic uses for exactly two of anything; which two seas were meant is still disputed.
Q 24Which Arabic script style is the one used in print and by computers?
Naskh
Naskh won out because it is easy to read: it grew out of everyday business handwriting, then took over the copying of books, the Quran included, long before fonts adopted it.
Q 25Which two letters form the only mandatory ligature in Arabic writing?
Lām and alif
Lām and alif always merge into the looped shape لا, and that shape alone spells lā, the Arabic word for 'no'; every other ligature in the script is optional.
Q 26Which three Arabic letters share one basic shape and differ only by their dots?
b, t and th
b, t and th are one shallow curve told apart only by dots: one below for b, two above for t, three above for th. The earliest Quran manuscripts used such dots sparingly, so readers had to work the letters out.
Q 27Arabic script evolved from which earlier script, written by the people who carved Petra?
Nabataean
Nabataean belonged to an Arab kingdom that wrote its inscriptions in Aramaic; a cursive form of its letters then grew into the Arabic alphabet from the 4th century on.
Q 28Which place's name began as the Arabic Jabal Ṭāriq, 'Tariq's mountain'?
Gibraltar
Gibraltar is Jabal Ṭāriq worn down by European tongues; it honours Tariq ibn Ziyad, the general whose army crossed from North Africa in 711 and began the Muslim conquest of Iberia.
Q 29Morocco's Arabic name, al-Maghrib, points to which direction?
West
West: al-Maghrib means 'the place where the sun sets', and medieval Arab geographers called the region the Farthest West; the sunset prayer goes by the same word.
Q 30Europe calls the digits 0 to 9 'Arabic numerals', but where did the Arabs themselves get them from?
India
India is where the system began: al-Khwarizmi of Baghdad spread it around 825 with a book titled On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals, centuries before Europe named the digits after the Arabs.