Common Bond
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50 free Common Bond trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
A common bond question gives you a few things that seem to have nothing to do with each other and asks what links them. A piano, a map and a lock? All have keys. Chad, Jordan and Georgia? Each is a country as well as a first name. The fun is in the click, the moment loose items snap into one group. It is a staple round at pub quizzes and trivia nights because everyone at the table can have a go, and the answer always feels obvious one second after you hear it. This quiz has 50 common bond trivia questions with answers. Each one lists a handful of names, words or objects and gives you four possible links to choose from. The connections run across science, history, geography, food, sport, music, film and language, so no single specialism wins. The early questions are the kind most people can reason out; later ones reward the player who remembers an odd fact from school or a late-night documentary. Every answer comes with a short explanation of what the items share and one extra detail worth repeating. It is built for quiz hosts looking for common bond round ideas, for teachers and families who want a what-do-these-things-have-in-common game, and for anyone who enjoys lateral thinking. Play the questions online, or print them with the answers for your next trivia night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What do bananas, tomatoes and grapes have in common that strawberries and raspberries lack?
Botanical berries
Botanical berries are fleshy fruits produced from a single flower with one ovary, so cucumbers and aubergines qualify too. Strawberries, despite the name, are accessory fruits.
Q 02What do the hammer, the anvil and the stirrup have in common, far from any blacksmith's forge?
Bones in the ear
Bones in the ear, known in Latin as the malleus, incus and stapes, pass sound vibrations on from the eardrum. The stirrup is the smallest and lightest bone in the human body.
Q 03What do July and August have in common, having once been called Quintilis and Sextilis?
Named after Roman leaders
Named after Roman leaders, the months honour Julius Caesar and Augustus. The Senate renamed Quintilis in 44 BC, the month of Caesar's birth, and Sextilis followed in 8 BC.
Q 04What do the sandwich, the cardigan and the wellington boot have in common in their naming stories?
British aristocrats
British aristocrats gave all three their names: the 4th Earl of Sandwich, the 7th Earl of Cardigan and the 1st Duke of Wellington, who had his shoemaker modify the Hessian boot.
Q 05What do the everyday words scuba, laser and radar have in common in the way each was coined?
They began as acronyms
They began as acronyms: laser stands for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. Once the words behind an acronym fade from memory, it may be termed an anacronym.
Q 06What do the platypus and the echidna have in common that no other living mammal shares?
They lay eggs
They lay eggs rather than bearing live young, yet the females still nurse their hatchlings with milk. The platypus and four kinds of echidna are the only monotremes alive today.
Q 07What do Leonardo, Raphael and Donatello have in common, besides naming Italian Renaissance artists?
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird considered Japanese names before settling on Renaissance artists. Michelangelo, the fourth turtle, completes the set.
Q 08What do a birdie, an eagle and an albatross have in common, apart from the obvious feathers?
Golf scores under par
Golf scores under par go by those names, for one, two and three strokes better on a single hole. The albatross, named for one of the largest birds, is also called a double eagle in the US.
Q 09What do Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune have in common that went undiscovered until the space age?
A system of rings
A system of rings circles all four giant planets, but Saturn's is the biggest and most visible. Uranus's went unnoticed until 1977, and Jupiter's until Voyager 1 flew past in 1979.
Q 10What do broccoli, kale and Brussels sprouts have in common, despite looking nothing alike?
They are one species
They are one species, Brassica oleracea, bred into cultivars so different that some are hardly recognisable as relatives. Cabbage, cauliflower and collards belong to it too.
Q 11What do Mercury, Gemini and Apollo have in common in the history of the 1960s?
NASA crewed space programs
NASA crewed space programs carried those names in turn during the 1960s. Gemini, Latin for twins, suited a capsule built for two astronauts, between one-man Mercury and three-man Apollo.
Q 12What do Foxtrot, Tango and Whiskey have in common, though only two of them are dances?
NATO phonetic alphabet words
NATO phonetic alphabet words stand for F, T and W when letters are spelled aloud by radio. Alfa and Juliett are deliberately misspelled so that speakers of other languages pronounce them correctly.
Q 13What do rock stars Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison have in common, beyond 1960s fame?
Q 21What do Blinky, Pinky and Inky have in common with their orange companion Clyde?
Ghosts in Pac-Man
Ghosts in Pac-Man each hunt differently: Blinky gives direct chase, Pinky and Inky try to get in front, and Clyde switches between chasing and fleeing. In Japan the game was first titled Puck Man.
Q 22What do Colonel Mustard, Miss Scarlett and Professor Plum have in common around a murder scene?
Suspects in Clue (Cluedo)
Suspects in Clue (Cluedo) number six in the standard edition, and Miss Scarlett traditionally moved first. Anthony Pratt, a Birmingham musician, devised the game in 1943 during wartime air raids.
Q 23What do a full house, a flush and a straight have in common at a card table?
They died aged 27
They died aged 27 within a single year, across 1970 and 1971. The idea of a '27 Club' only took hold after Kurt Cobain died at the same age in 1994.
Q 14What do Vatican City, San Marino and Lesotho have in common that no other sovereign state shares?
Wholly enclosed by one neighbour
Wholly enclosed by one neighbour, each is a sovereign enclave: Italy surrounds Vatican City and San Marino, while South Africa surrounds Lesotho, the largest of the three.
Q 15What do peanuts, peas and lentils have in common, even though one is usually sold as a nut?
Legumes
Legumes carry their seeds in pods, and the peanut ripens its pods underground, earning the other name groundnut. Like its relatives, it hosts bacteria in its roots that fix nitrogen.
Q 16What do spiders, scorpions and ticks have in common that sets them apart from true insects?
Arachnids
Arachnids have eight legs as adults where insects have six, and they lack antennae and wings. Mites, harvestmen and camel spiders belong to the group too.
Q 17Which word do Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia officially use in place of 'state'?
Commonwealth
Commonwealth appears in the full official names of all four, yet the label is merely stylistic and carries no legal or political significance.
Q 18What do neon, argon and krypton have in common, in the far-right column of the periodic table?
Noble gases
Noble gases are colourless, odourless and so unreactive that argon is pumped into incandescent light bulbs to stop the hot filament from oxidising.
Q 19What do presidents Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy have in common with Abraham Lincoln?
They were assassinated
They were assassinated in office, though Garfield lingered for weeks while his doctors' hunt for the bullet likely aggravated his wounds and introduced infection.
Q 20What do Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves and Catherine Parr have in common in Tudor history?
Wives of Henry VIII
Wives of Henry VIII are remembered by the rhyme 'Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived'. Catherine Parr is the rhyme's survivor, yet Anne of Cleves outlived them all, dying in 1557.
Poker hands
Poker hands rank in exactly that order, a full house beating a flush and a flush beating a straight. Put the last two together and the straight flush outranks all three.
Q 24What do the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa María have in common in the story of 1492?
Columbus's ships
Columbus's ships were modest merchant vessels, and one never came home: the Santa María ran aground on Christmas Day 1492, and its timbers went into a fort named La Navidad.
Q 25What do Gold, Juno and Sword have in common with Utah and Omaha in the history of 1944?
D-Day landing beaches
D-Day landing beaches carried those code names along an 80-kilometre stretch of Normandy coast. Troops from Britain took Gold and Sword, Canadians landed at Juno, and Americans at the other two.
Q 26What do Goldfinger, Moonraker and Diamonds Are Forever have in common, beyond Shirley Bassey themes?
James Bond films
James Bond films gave Shirley Bassey three of her best-known recordings, because the series brought her back twice after Goldfinger. Roger Moore starred in Moonraker, Sean Connery in the other two.
Q 27Which museum do the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace share?
The Louvre
The Louvre has shown the Winged Victory at the top of its main staircase since 1884. The Mona Lisa owes part of its fame to being stolen from the building in 1911 by a former worker, Vincenzo Peruggia.
Q 28What fate do Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae have in common from the year 79 AD?
Buried by Mount Vesuvius
Buried by Mount Vesuvius, the three towns lay under metres of ash and pumice. Pliny the Elder, admiral of the nearby fleet, died trying to rescue people stranded by the eruption.
Q 29What do Carrie, The Shining and Misery have in common, on the page before the cinema screen?
Novels by Stephen King
Novels by Stephen King began with Carrie, his 1974 debut, which survived only because his wife Tabitha rescued the first pages from the trash and persuaded him to keep writing.
Q 30What do Fagin, Ebenezer Scrooge and Miss Havisham have in common as figures of Victorian fiction?
Charles Dickens characters
Charles Dickens characters have a way of outliving their books: Scrooge's surname has entered the English language as a byword for greed and misanthropy.