Coins
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Coins trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every coin is a tiny public monument. Governments use them to say who matters, what they believe and what they can afford, which is why a handful of loose change can tell you about wars, metal shortages, royal vanity and the occasional heist. This quiz covers the coins people actually ask about: the faces, buildings and animals on American change, the mottoes and mint marks, famous rarities that sell for millions, and money from Britain, Europe, Asia and the ancient world. It also dips into the vocabulary collectors use and the places coins turn up in films, cartoons and holiday traditions. It is written for curious players, classroom and pub quiz hosts, and collectors who want to test themselves. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave knowing a few stories worth repeating the next time someone hands you change.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which scientist spent 30 years at England's Royal Mint, sending coin counterfeiters to the gallows?
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton took the post of Warden in 1696 and treated it as detective work, building the case that hanged the serial counterfeiter William Chaloner.
Q 02Which metal makes up 75% of the US five-cent coin, even though the coin is named after another?
Copper
Copper outweighs nickel three to one in the coin, a recipe unchanged since 1866 apart from World War II issues that swapped the nickel for silver and manganese.
Q 03Which Oregon city was named by a coin toss, with Boston as the losing choice?
Portland
Portland won because Francis Pettygrove of Portland, Maine, took two of three tosses against Asa Lovejoy of Boston; the 1835 cent they flipped is kept on display in a museum.
Q 04Coins tossed over the shoulder into which Roman landmark are collected and given to charity?
Trevi Fountain
Trevi Fountain coins are swept up and donated to the Catholic charity Caritas, and legend says a coin tossed with the right hand over the left shoulder guarantees a return to Rome.
Q 05Which president became the first on a circulating US coin in 1909, a century after his birth?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln broke a taboo, since presidential portraits had been shunned as too monarchical, and the designer's initials caused such a fuss that they were removed within days.
Q 06The words money and mint both descend from Moneta, a title of which Roman goddess?
Juno
Juno had a temple on the Capitoline Hill, and Rome struck its coins in or beside it, so her title Moneta came to mean the mint and then the money it made.
Q 07Which cartoon tycoon prizes his Number One Dime, the first coin he ever earned, above his fortune?
Scrooge McDuck
Scrooge McDuck earned it at ten in Glasgow, cleaning a ditch-digger's filthy boots, only to find he had been paid with an American coin that was useless in Scotland.
Q 08What did the earliest known coin-operated machine, described by Hero of Alexandria, dispense?
Holy water
Holy water flowed while the coin's weight tipped a lever inside; when the coin slid off, a counterweight shut the valve, a trick vending machines reused about 1,800 years later.
Q 09Which reformer was the first real woman on a circulating US coin, a dollar mistaken for a quarter?
Susan B. Anthony
Susan B. Anthony replaced a planned figure of Liberty in 1979, but the coin was so close to the quarter in size and metal that critics nicknamed it the Carter quarter.
Q 10Which zinc-coated metal replaced bronze in US cents for 1943 only, freeing supplies for ammunition?
Steel
Steel cents rusted and confused vending machines, so 1944 cents were made from salvaged shell casings; a 1943 cent struck by mistake on a leftover bronze blank later sold for $1.7 million.
Q 11Which president was honored on the US dime from 1946 for helping found the March of Dimes?
Franklin Roosevelt
Franklin Roosevelt died in April 1945 and the coin came out on what would have been his 64th birthday; rumor claimed the designer's initials, JS, were a tribute to Joseph Stalin.
Q 12Which presidential home has appeared on the back of most US nickels struck since 1938?
Monticello
Monticello arrived in 1938 after Felix Schlag won a $1,000 open contest, only to be ordered to submit an entirely new reverse before the coin could go into production.
Q 13Which state, the first to ratify the Constitution, opened the 50 State Quarters series?
Delaware
Q 21Which animal appears on the Canadian two-dollar coin, the bimetallic piece nicknamed the toonie?
Polar bear
Polar bear art by Brent Townsend has backed the coin since 1996; an Inuit member of Parliament proposed calling it the Nanuq, but the rhyme with loonie won out.
Q 22Which musical instrument, a national emblem since the Middle Ages, appears on every Irish euro coin?
Harp
Harp designs on every Irish coin copy the medieval Brian Boru harp kept at Trinity College Dublin, the same emblem that appears on the seals of the president and the government.
Q 23Which Leonardo da Vinci work is on Italy's one-euro coin, the only design not put to a public vote?
Vitruvian Man
Delaware led because the quarters appeared in the order the states ratified the Constitution or joined the Union, a ten-year rollout that about half of all Americans collected.
Q 14Which crop frames the words ONE CENT on the back of US pennies struck from 1909 to 1958?
Wheat
Wheat ears, two of them, gave the pennies their collector nickname and lasted until 1959, when a memorial building took their place for the 150th anniversary of a president's birth.
Q 15Which zoo animal did sculptor James Earle Fraser name as his model for the 1913 US five-cent coin?
Bison
A bison called Black Diamond was the model, Fraser said, and a stubborn one that kept facing him head-on; the animal was sold for slaughter in 1915, two years into the coin's run.
Q 16Which Native American woman appears carrying her infant son on the golden dollar issued in 2000?
Sacagawea
Sacagawea, the Shoshone guide of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, left no known portrait, so sculptor Glenna Goodacre asked a young Native American woman, Randy'L He-dow Teton, to model for the coin.
Q 17Which poet, shown before a bird in flight, became the first Black woman on a US quarter?
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou opened the American Women Quarters series in 2022; the bird behind her is a purple martin, native to Arkansas, where she grew up, and a nod to her best-known memoir.
Q 18Which figure replaced the eagle on Bicentennial US quarters, the winner of a national contest?
Colonial drummer
A colonial drummer by Jack Ahr, who said his son had posed for it, was picked from 884 entries; every Bicentennial quarter carries the double date 1776–1976, so none is dated 1975.
Q 19Which city, then the national capital, became home to the first United States Mint in 1792?
Philadelphia
Philadelphia got the Mint because the government sat there, and its first director was a scientist, the astronomer David Rittenhouse, who bought the building lots himself that July.
Q 20Which Latin motto on US coins served as the unofficial national motto until 1956?
E pluribus unum
E pluribus unum, meaning out of many, one, has thirteen letters to match the original colonies, and it reached coins in 1786 on New Jersey's state cents, six years before a national mint existed.
Vitruvian Man was picked personally by economy minister Carlo Azeglio Ciampi before any vote was held; Italians then chose the other seven designs by phoning in during a television broadcast.
Q 24Which animal has backed the Australian 20-cent coin since decimal currency arrived in 1966?
Platypus
Platypus artist Stuart Devlin was a goldsmith who won a 1964 competition to design Australia's first decimal coins, and he went on to design coins for 36 nations.
Q 25Which nation's five-unit coin is offered at shrines because its name echoes a word for connection?
Japan
Japan's five-yen coin is called go en, a homophone of a respectful word for a bond, so worshippers toss it into shrine offering boxes hoping to tie themselves to the deity.
Q 26What shape is the central hole of a traditional Chinese cash coin, used to string coins together?
Square
Square holes inside round rims are commonly linked to the old Chinese picture of a round heaven over a flat, four-cornered earth, and a full string nominally held 1,000 coins.
Q 27Which British gold coin came to be worth 21 shillings, a shilling more than a pound?
Guinea
Guinea coins were named for the Guinea region of West Africa, which supplied much of their gold, and the price outlived them: racehorse auctions kept bidding in guineas, the extra shilling being the auctioneer's commission.
Q 28Which shield-carrying female figure from Roman coins was revived on English money under Charles II?
Britannia
Britannia swapped her Roman spear for a trident in 1797 to mark the Royal Navy's victories, and she gained a helmet in 1825.
Q 29Which foreign silver coin stayed legal tender in the United States until the Coinage Act of 1857?
Spanish dollar
Spanish dollar coins, the pieces of eight of pirate lore, were worth eight reales, and each real was known as a bit, which is how a US quarter came to be called two bits.
Q 30Foil-wrapped chocolate coins called gelt are handed to children during which Jewish festival?
Hanukkah
Hanukkah gelt began as real money given to children, and the chocolate version arrived only in the twentieth century, when American candy makers wrapped it in gold foil.