Dental & Dentist Trivia
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184 free Dental & Dentist trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
87 free Dental & Dentist trivia questions with answers. This dental trivia quiz is for dental offices, hygiene classes, National Dentist's Day, or anyone who has ever wondered whether George Washington's teeth were really wooden (they were not). It covers the mouth itself - how many baby and adult teeth we grow, what enamel, dentin and pulp actually are, why wisdom teeth got their name and which bacterium does most of the damage - and then the history: Pierre Fauchard's 1728 treatise, the world's first dental college, the first woman to graduate as a dentist, the Hartford dentist who discovered anesthesia and never patented it, and the Michigan city where fluoridated water was first tested. There is lighter material too: the tooth fairy's first appearance in a Chicago newspaper, Spain's tooth mouse Ratoncito Perez, striped toothpaste, the first electric toothbrush, shark and narwhal teeth, and Paul Revere's turn as a forensic dentist. About a third of the questions are easy enough for kids in a waiting room; the rest climb to questions that will make a hygienist pause. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and the primary sources it cites, and each explanation adds one more thing worth knowing.
30 of 184 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many permanent (adult) teeth does a person usually have?
32
They split evenly, 16 in the upper jaw and 16 in the lower, and the count includes four wisdom teeth that many people never fully grow.
Q 02How many baby (primary) teeth does a child normally grow?
20
Ten sit in the upper jaw and ten in the lower, and there are no premolars in the set at all - the baby molars are later replaced by premolars.
Q 03Which is the hardest substance in the human body?
Tooth enamel
Tooth enamel rates around 5 on the Mohs scale, harder than bone and about as hard as steel, yet it is brittle and cannot repair itself once chipped or decayed.
Q 04What is the soft tissue in the center of a tooth, full of blood vessels and nerves, called?
Pulp
Pulp is what patients usually just call 'the nerve', and it is what a root canal removes.
Q 05Which of the four tissues of a tooth sits between the outer enamel and the inner nerve chamber?
Dentin
Dentin lies between the enamel and the pulp chamber; it is yellowish, porous, softer than enamel, and keeps forming slowly throughout life.
Q 06Which type of tooth is designed mainly for tearing food?
Canines
Canines, the pointed teeth beside the incisors, tear food; incisors cut, molars grind, and premolars do a little of both.
Q 07Premolars are also known by what other name?
Bicuspids
Bicuspids is the other name for premolars, from their two cusps or points; molars carry four or five cusps.
Q 08Wisdom teeth are formally known as which teeth?
Third molars
Third molars got their nickname because they arrive so late, probably as a translation of the Latin dens sapientiae.
Q 09Which bacterium is most closely associated with tooth decay?
Streptococcus mutans
It feeds on sugars and excretes lactic acid, which is what actually dissolves the enamel; the bacteria live in the biofilm we call plaque.
Q 10The word 'caries', the medical name for tooth decay, comes from a Latin word meaning what?
Rottenness
As of 2016 roughly 3.6 billion people, nearly half the planet, had it in their permanent teeth.
Q 11An ancient Sumerian text blamed cavities on what?
A tooth worm
The same idea shows up in ancient India, Egypt, Japan and China, and the surgeon Guy de Chauliac was still promoting it in the 14th century.
Q 12Which ancient Mesopotamian law code prescribes knocking out teeth as a punishment?
The Code of Hammurabi
The Code of Hammurabi, around 1750 BC, orders a man's teeth knocked out for knocking out another's; Egypt's Edwin Smith Papyrus was meanwhile describing treatment of broken jaws.
Q 13Hesy-Ra, an official under the pharaoh Djoser, holds what distinction in dental history?
He is the earliest named dentist
Q 21How many natural teeth did George Washington have left on the day of his first inauguration in 1789?
One
The survivor was a premolar, and he later gave it to his dentist John Greenwood as a keepsake.
Q 22Which Revolutionary hero and part-time dentist identified a friend's body by a false tooth he had wired in?
Paul Revere
The body was Joseph Warren's, dug up nine months after Bunker Hill; it is often cited as the first forensic dental identification in America.
Q 23Which ancient people made partial dentures held with gold bands as early as the 7th century BC?
Etruscans
The Etruscans bound replacement teeth with gold bands from the 7th century BC; Romans likely borrowed the technique, and porcelain dentures did not arrive until around 1770.
Hesy-Ra, around 2600 BC, is the earliest named dentist; his title Wer-ibehsenjw translates as 'Great one of the ivory cutters' or 'Great one of the dentists'.
Q 14Which Frenchman is credited as the 'father of modern dentistry' for his 1728 book The Surgeon Dentist?
Pierre Fauchard
Pierre Fauchard adapted tools from watchmakers, jewellers and barbers, and blamed sugar acids for decay a century and a half before germ theory.
Q 15Before dentistry was a profession, tooth-pullers used an imprecise tool named after which bird?
Pelican
The dental pelican, named for its beak-like claw, levered teeth out sideways and often took healthy teeth, and sometimes part of the jaw, along with the bad one.
Q 16The world's first dental college opened in 1840 in which US city?
Baltimore
The Baltimore College of Dental Surgery opened in 1840; Cincinnati's Ohio College of Dental Surgery followed in 1845 and later graduated the first woman dentist.
Q 17Who was the first woman in the world to graduate from a dental college, in 1866?
Lucy Hobbs Taylor
Lucy Hobbs Taylor graduated from the Ohio College of Dental Surgery in 1866 after being refused for her sex; she had simply opened her own practice in 1861 instead.
Q 18Hartford dentist Horace Wells pioneered surgical anesthesia in 1844 using which gas?
Nitrous oxide
He never patented it, believing freedom from pain should be 'as free as the air we breathe', and his own student William Morton later took the credit with ether.
Q 19How did Horace Wells first test his anesthetic gas on 11 December 1844?
On his own wisdom tooth
Wells had colleague John Riggs pull his own wisdom tooth while he breathed nitrous oxide, and declared afterward he had not felt it 'so much as the prick of a pin'.
Q 20Which material was actually in George Washington's dentures, which were never made of wood?
Hippopotamus ivory
Hippopotamus ivory, along with human and cow teeth and lead, made up his dentures; ivory stains quickly, which may be how the wooden-teeth myth started.
Q 24In which US city was water fluoridation first tested, starting on 25 January 1945?
Grand Rapids, Michigan
Results published in 1950 showed a big drop in cavities; the whole idea grew out of a 30-year hunt for the cause of the 'Colorado brown stain'.
Q 25Dentist Frederick McKay spent 30 years investigating a mottled-tooth condition known by what name?
Colorado brown stain
Frederick McKay's 'Colorado brown stain' teeth were oddly cavity-free; in 1931 Alcoa chemist H. V. Churchill found fluoride in the local water was the common factor.
Q 26In 2015, what fluoride level did the US recommend for community drinking water?
0.7 mg/L
Older guidance from 1962 allowed up to 1.2 mg/L in cooler climates, on the theory that people in hot places drink more water; the 2015 figure was 0.7 mg/L.
Q 27The first nylon-bristle toothbrush went on sale in 1938 thanks to which company's new fiber?
DuPont
DuPont's new nylon went into Dr. West's Miracle-Tuft toothbrush in 1938; earlier bristles were usually Siberian boar hair, which held bacteria, dried badly and fell out.
Q 28The first electric toothbrush, the Broxodent, was invented in 1954 in which country?
Switzerland
The Broxodent was developed in Switzerland in 1954 by Dr Philippe-Guy Woog; studies since find powered brushes about equal to good manual brushing, with slightly less plaque.
Q 29What was the toothbrush's ancestor, a frayed twig found in Sumerian sites from 3500 BC?
The chew stick
The chew stick had one frayed end for brushing and a pointed end as a toothpick; its descendant, the miswak, is recommended in Islamic tradition for cleaning teeth before prayer.
Q 30In the US, daily tooth brushing did not become routine until after which event?
World War II
World War II soldiers were required to clean their teeth every day and brought the habit home; the first US toothbrush patent had been granted back in 1857.