English Language Trivia
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99 free English Language trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This English language trivia quiz covers where the language came from and the odd facts it collected along the way. It starts with origins: the Angles who gave English its name, the West Germanic roots, the Old Norse words the Vikings left behind (they, sky, egg), the Norman Conquest and the French that makes up roughly 28 per cent of the lexicon, and the Great Vowel Shift that explains why English spelling looks nothing like its sounds. Then it turns to the books and people who fixed the language on paper: Beowulf, Chaucer, William Caxton's press, the King James Bible, Samuel Johnson's dictionary, Noah Webster's American spellings and the Oxford English Dictionary. The easy questions ask how many letters the alphabet has, which pangram typists know by heart, and what 'ghoti' is supposed to spell. The harder ones ask who coined the term Great Vowel Shift, how many senses the OED once gave the verb 'set', which letter became the 'Y' in 'ye olde', what the ampersand's name is a corruption of, and how many words Shakespeare is said to have used first. Our languages trivia quiz and literature trivia quiz are the neighbouring pages. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry for the language, the book or the dictionary before publishing, and the sentence that supports it is stored with each question.
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Q 01English is named after which people who migrated to Britain after Roman rule?
The Angles
The Angles left Angeln, a peninsula on the Baltic, so thoroughly that Bede wrote almost three centuries later that their old homeland was said to lie empty still.
Q 02To which branch of the Indo-European family does English belong?
West Germanic
West Germanic is the branch of Dutch, German and Frisian. English and Frisian both softened an old k sound, which is why English says cheese where Dutch has kaas and German has Käse.
Q 03In Ethnologue's 2025 count, English ranked third among native languages, behind Mandarin Chinese and which other language?
Spanish
Spanish has roughly 100 million more native speakers than English, but count everyone who learned a language later in life and English jumps to first place in the world.
Q 04Which industry's UN agency has required its international workers to prove English proficiency since 2008?
Aviation
Aviation: since March 2008 pilots and air traffic controllers on international routes have needed an English endorsement on their licences, after crash inquiries kept pointing to misunderstood radio calls.
Q 05How was English designated America's official language in 2025?
Executive order
An executive order did it: Congress had never passed a law naming a national language, even though more than 30 states had already made English official on their own.
Q 06Which of these meats takes its name from medieval French rather than Old English?
Beef
Beef came from Old French buef around 1300, while lamb, ham and chicken are Old English. The novel Ivanhoe made the pattern famous: its jester jokes that the ox turns French once it reaches the table.
Q 07Modern English exists on a dialect continuum with which language?
Scots
Scots had become the national language of Stewart Scotland by the early 1500s, but Bibles and books printed in England steadily pulled its written form toward English.
Q 08Which pronouns did English take from Old Norse, replacing Old English forms that began with h-?
They, them, their
They, them, their pushed out native forms beginning with h. One may survive: the 'em of "go get 'em" began, at least in part, as Middle English hem and was only later taken for a clipped them.
Q 09Which of these everyday words is an Old Norse loanword?
Egg
Egg pushed out the native word only around 1500. In a tale printed in 1490, a merchant asking for "egges" in Kent is told by the woman of the house that she speaks no French; she knew them as "eyren".
Q 10Which king had Latin books translated into Old English?
Alfred the Great
Alfred the Great complained that hardly anyone in England could still read Latin, so he launched a programme to put the books "most necessary for all men to know" into English.
Q 11The Scandinavian-controlled region of northern and eastern England was called what?
The Danelaw
The Danelaw means the Danes' law: the name covers both their legal customs and the land where those ran, north and east of a line from London to Chester. Village names ending in -by and -thorp still show how thickly they settled.
Q 12Which event made French the language of England's royal court, law and ruling class?
The Norman Conquest
The Norman Conquest of 1066 put French speakers in charge of court and law. English won back the right to plead a case only in 1362, and lawyers kept scraps of Law French until the 1730s.
Q 13Which change from around 1400 is a major reason English spelling and sounds differ?
Q 21Samuel Johnson's dictionary said which grain "supports the people" in Scotland?
Oats
Oats, the entry begins, are in England "generally given to horses". The jab at Scotland did not stop him touring the Hebrides in 1773 with Boswell, his Scottish biographer.
Q 22Which animal's name, missing from British dictionaries, did Noah Webster add to his 1828 American Dictionary?
Skunk
Skunk, an Algonquian word, was missing from Samuel Johnson's dictionary, which did list the moose and the "rackoon". For all its American pride, Webster's book was finished abroad: he sailed to Europe in 1824 to complete it.
Q 23Which brothers bought the rights to Noah Webster's dictionary after his death?
Merriam
The Great Vowel Shift
The Great Vowel Shift moved every long vowel just as spelling was being fixed, which is why letters and sounds parted ways: "fine" was once said with the vowel of "fee" and "house" with that of "moose".
Q 14Which word appears more often than any other in written English?
The
The leads every major word count. Old English shared the job among se, seo and thaet, one for each grammatical gender, before the three collapsed into a single all-purpose form.
Q 15Which fantasy author's 1936 lecture transformed Beowulf studies?
J. R. R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien, a lifelong scholar of Old English, said critics had quarried Beowulf for history and brushed its monsters aside, when the monsters were the heart of the poem.
Q 16Which poet was first buried in Poets' Corner?
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer was laid there in 1400, it seems as a royal official who lived beside the Abbey rather than as a poet. The corner took shape only after Edmund Spenser was buried near him two centuries later.
Q 17Who is thought to have introduced the printing press to England in 1476?
William Caxton
William Caxton was a merchant in Bruges when he learned printing in Cologne, so the first book printed in English, his own translation of a French romance about Troy, came off a press in Flanders, not England.
Q 18The Bible commissioned in 1604 takes its popular name from which king?
James I
James I approved the translation and about 50 scholars delivered it in 1611. Britain knows it as the Authorized Version, although no record of any formal authorization survives.
Q 19Which Shakespeare play gave English the phrases "to the manner born" and "hoist with his own petard"?
Hamlet
Hamlet. A petard was a small bomb for blowing in gates, so to be hoist with your own was to be blown skyward by your own device; the word comes from the French for breaking wind.
Q 20In his 1755 dictionary, Samuel Johnson defined which occupation as "a harmless drudge"?
Lexicographer
Lexicographer, meaning himself. Johnson had bragged he would finish in three years what took forty French academicians forty, then spent most of a decade on it.
The Merriam brothers, printers from Massachusetts, bought the rights but could not keep the name to themselves: courts later ruled that "Webster's" was free for any dictionary to use.
Q 24Noah Webster's 1828 dictionary insisted "tongue" should really be written how?
Tung
Tung was right and "our common orthography is incorrect", Webster wrote. Americans ignored him there, though they kept his -er for -re in words such as center.
Q 25The OED's first part took five years and ran from A to which word?
Ant
Ant closed the first 352-page part in 1884. The whole dictionary had been promised in ten years, but the last part did not appear until 1928, almost half a century after the contract was signed.
Q 26The killer W. C. Minor sent the OED quotations from where?
Lunatic asylum
A lunatic asylum: the former US Army surgeon shot a stranger in 1872 while in the grip of a delusion and was sent to Broadmoor, where he read through his own library and posted quotations to the editors for two decades.
Q 27Which short verb had the longest entry in the OED's second edition?
Set
Set needed 60,000 words in the 1989 edition, but it has since been dethroned: the revised entry for run, finished in 2011, lists 645 senses for the verb alone.
Q 28James Murray edited the OED from a garden shed known by which grand name?
The Scriptorium
The Scriptorium was lined with pigeon-holes because Murray had inherited nearly two tons of quotation slips from the previous editor, and volunteer readers kept posting more.
Q 29Which newly discovered element was struck from the OED's proofs in 1902 on its chief editor's advice?
Radium
Radium went because a chemistry graduate told James Murray the discovery might prove a blunder. The next year the Curies shared a Nobel Prize, and the word had to wait for the 1933 supplement.
Q 30Which long word, built from four Latin terms for 'nothing', means the habit of judging things worthless?
Floccinaucinihilipilification
Floccinaucinihilipilification joins flocci, nauci, nihili and pili, which stood side by side in a rule of the Eton Latin Grammar. It is first recorded in a letter of 1741 and was the longest word in the first OED.