140 free Dental & Dentist trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 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 140 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
It rates about 5 on the Mohs scale, between steel and titanium, yet it is as brittle as glass and never regrows once lost.
Q 04What is the soft tissue in the center of a tooth, full of blood vessels and nerves, called?
Pulp
Patients usually just call it '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
It is yellow-hued and porous, softer than enamel, and it keeps forming slowly throughout life.
Q 06Which type of tooth is designed mainly for tearing food?
Canines
Incisors cut, molars grind, and the pointed teeth on either side of the incisors do the tearing - the same job they do far more dramatically in a dog.
Q 07Premolars are also known by what other name?
Bicuspids
The name refers to their two cusps, or points; molars have four or five.
Q 08Wisdom teeth are formally known as which teeth?
Third molars
They got the nickname because they arrive so late, when a person is presumably wiser, probably as a translation of the Latin dens sapientiae.
Q 09According to a 2024 survey, roughly what share of Americans had had their wisdom teeth removed?
About 53%
Among 18-to-29-year-olds the figure was only 26%, partly because some dentists have stopped recommending routine extractions.
Q 10Impacted wisdom teeth became roughly ten times more common after which historical shift?
The Industrial Revolution
Soft, processed food meant less chewing stress, so jaws grew shorter and wider and ran out of room for the last molars.
Q 11Which 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 12The 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 13An 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 21How did Horace Wells first test his anesthetic gas on 11 December 1844?
On his own wisdom tooth
His partner John Riggs did the pulling, and Wells declared afterward that he had not felt it 'so much as the prick of a pin'.
Q 22George Washington's dentures were famously NOT made of wood. Which material was actually among them?
Hippopotamus ivory
Ivory stains quickly, which may be how the wooden-teeth myth started; textbooks repeated it well into the 20th century.
Q 23How 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 14Which 18th-century BC Babylonian law collection mentions pulling teeth as a punishment?
The Code of Hammurabi
It refers to extraction twice; meanwhile the Edwin Smith Papyrus from Egypt was discussing how to treat broken jaws.
Q 15Hesy-Ra, an official under the pharaoh Djoser, holds what distinction in dental history?
He is the earliest named dentist
His title Wer-ibehsenjw translates either as 'Great one of the ivory cutters' or 'Great one of the dentists', which is a lot of hedging for one job description.
Q 16Which Frenchman is credited as the 'father of modern dentistry' for his 1728 book The Surgeon Dentist?
Pierre Fauchard
He adapted tools from watchmakers, jewelers and barbers, and blamed sugar acids for decay a century and a half before germ theory.
Q 17Before dentistry was a profession, tooth-pullers used an imprecise tool named after which bird?
Pelican
They often took healthy teeth along with the bad one, and sometimes part of the jaw.
Q 18The world's first dental college opened in 1840 in which US city?
Baltimore
Cincinnati's Ohio College of Dental Surgery followed in 1845, and it was that school that later admitted the first woman dental graduate.
Q 19Who was the first woman in the world to graduate from a dental college, in 1866?
Lucy Hobbs Taylor
She had been refused admission twice for being a woman, so she simply opened her own practice in 1861 and was admitted as a senior once the ban was lifted.
Q 20Hartford 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 24Which 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 25Which ancient people made partial dentures held with gold bands as early as the 7th century BC?
Etruscans
The Romans probably borrowed the technique by the 5th century BC; porcelain dentures did not arrive until around 1770.
Q 26In 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 27Dentist Frederick McKay spent 30 years investigating a mottled-tooth condition known by what name?
Colorado brown stain
The stained teeth were oddly cavity-free, and an Alcoa chemist eventually found fluoride in the local water was the common factor.
Q 28In 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 29The first nylon-bristle toothbrush went on sale in 1938 thanks to which company's new fiber?
DuPont
Before nylon, bristles were usually Siberian boar hair, which held bacteria, dried badly and fell out.
Q 30The first electric toothbrush, the Broxodent, was invented in 1954 in which country?
Switzerland
Studies since have found powered brushes about equal to good manual brushing, with perhaps a little less plaque and gingivitis.