ELA Trivia
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99 free ELA trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
40 free ELA trivia questions with answers. This is an English Language Arts round built for classrooms, review games and anyone who wants to find out how much of ninth-grade English actually stuck. The 99 questions cover the four blocks every ELA curriculum returns to: figurative language, grammar, punctuation and poetic form. There are questions on the difference between a simile and a metaphor, what an oxymoron actually is, what each of the eight parts of speech does, where the serial comma is preferred, how a Petrarchan sonnet differs from a Shakespearean one, what a kigo and a kireji do in a haiku, and why an iamb sounds like the word 'above'. Every answer was checked against a primary reference before publication, so definitions here match what a marking scheme would accept. Teachers can run it as a warm-up or a review round; students can use it to test themselves before a unit exam.
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Q 01Which device compares two unlike things using 'like' or 'as'?
A simile
A simile signals its comparison openly, as in 'as brave as a lion'. The name is Latin for 'a likeness', from similis, the root of 'similar'.
Q 02Which device makes a direct comparison without announcing it with a linking word?
A metaphor
A metaphor states the comparison as fact: 'the classroom was a zoo'. The word is Greek for 'a transfer', because it carries one thing's name over to another.
Q 03Which figure of speech gives an inanimate object human traits?
Personification
Personification, as in 'the wind whispered', can carry a whole story: the hero of The Pilgrim's Progress meets characters named Faithful, Hopeful and Giant Despair.
Q 04Which figure of speech uses deliberate exaggeration for effect?
Hyperbole
Hyperbole, as in 'I've told you a million times', takes its name from the Greek for 'a throwing beyond': the speaker overshoots the truth on purpose.
Q 05What is a two-word paradox built from opposites called?
An oxymoron
An oxymoron, like 'deafening silence', is one itself: the word joins the Greek for 'sharp' and 'dull', so it means something like 'pointedly foolish'.
Q 06What is the repetition of the same initial consonant sound across several words called?
Alliteration
Alliteration, as in 'Peter Piper picked a peck', once did the work of rhyme: Old English poems such as Beowulf bind each line with repeated opening sounds instead.
Q 07Which device uses words that imitate sounds?
Onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia, Greek for 'name-making', covers buzz, hiss and clang. It has named animals too: the cuckoo is called after the sound of its own call.
Q 08In classical rhetoric, which figures change what words mean, while schemes change only their order?
Tropes
Tropes, from the Greek for 'a turn', bend a word away from its literal meaning, as irony does. The term has since turned itself, and now also means a stock story device.
Q 09Words like 'the' and 'an' are sometimes counted as a ninth part of speech; what are they called?
Articles
Articles missed the classic list of eight because it was modelled on Latin, which has no word for 'the': Roman grammarians dropped the category the Greeks had used.
Q 10Which part of speech names a person, place, thing or idea?
A noun
A noun can be concrete like 'house' or abstract like 'happiness'. English once capitalised most of them: the 1787 US Constitution speaks of 'a more perfect Union' and 'the Blessings of Liberty'.
Q 11Which part of speech denotes an action, occurrence or state of being?
A verb
A verb, such as 'walk', 'happen' or 'be', carries what a sentence says. Its name comes from the Latin verbum, which simply meant 'word'.
Q 12What does an adjective modify?
A noun or pronoun
An adjective attaches to a noun or pronoun, as 'big' and 'brave' do. Its name comes from the Latin for 'added to', because it is tacked on to a noun.
Q 13Which part of speech can modify a verb, an adjective, a sentence or another of its own kind?
An adverb
An adverb needn't end in -ly, as 'very' and 'quite' show, and -ly doesn't make one either: 'friendly' and 'lovely' are adjectives.
Q 21Which punctuation mark fuses a question mark and an exclamation mark into a single symbol?
The interrobang
The interrobang, proposed in 1962, is named for what it joins: 'interro' from the interrogation point and 'bang', printers' slang for an exclamation mark.
Q 22With no dash key, what did typewriter users strike to stand for a long dash?
Two hyphens
Two hyphens stood in for a long dash because the typewriter gave the hyphen, the minus sign and every dash a single key. Many word processors turn that pair back into a true dash automatically.
Q 23How many lines does a sonnet traditionally have?
Fourteen
Fourteen lines is the rule, though Shakespeare broke it twice among his 154 sonnets: Sonnet 99 runs to fifteen lines and Sonnet 126 stops at twelve.
Q 14Which part of speech substitutes for a noun or noun phrase?
A pronoun
A pronoun such as 'he' or 'them' stands in for a name already mentioned. Using 'they' for one person is no modern habit: it is on record from the 1300s.
Q 15Which part of speech relates words to each other in a phrase, like 'in' and 'of'?
A preposition
A preposition can end a sentence in good English. The schoolroom ban took hold after the poet John Dryden faulted a line of Ben Jonson's in 1672, probably on a false analogy with Latin.
Q 16Which part of speech links words, phrases or clauses?
A conjunction
A conjunction such as 'and' or 'but' may open a sentence as well as join its parts: the schoolroom rule against it has been ignored by writers from Shakespeare onwards.
Q 17What is a word like 'Alas' or 'Huzzah' called?
An interjection
An interjection takes its name from the Latin for 'thrown between': words like 'Alas' are tossed into a sentence without being tied to its grammar.
Q 18Which symbol began as a handwritten ligature of the Latin word 'et'?
The ampersand
The ampersand fuses the letters e and t. Old schoolbooks put it at the end of the alphabet, and its name is a slurring of 'and per se and': the sign by itself means 'and'.
Q 19What forced the standardisation of punctuation in 15th-century Europe?
The rise of printing
The rise of printing made a standard system of marks urgent. The Venetian printer Aldus Manutius is credited with the semicolon and the modern comma.
Q 20Where is the serial comma, set before a list's final 'and', most common?
In the United States
In the United States it is standard outside journalism. Its other name, the Oxford comma, comes from the house style of Oxford University Press, though it is less usual in British writing.
Q 24What are the two parts of a typical Italian sonnet called?
An octave and a sestet
An octave and a sestet: eight lines that raise a question and six that answer it. Both lean on very few rhyme sounds, which comes easier in rhyme-rich Italian than in English.
Q 25What is the turn in a sonnet called?
The volta
The volta is Italian for 'turn'. Italian sonnets make it after the eighth line, but Shakespeare often held it back for his last two lines, which can overturn all that came before.
Q 26What is the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet?
ABAB CDCD EFEF GG
ABAB CDCD EFEF GG gives three quatrains and a closing couplet. The form carries Shakespeare's name, but the Earl of Surrey had established it decades before Shakespeare wrote.
Q 27The Italian sonnet is often named after which poet, who wrote hundreds of poems about a woman called Laura?
Petrarch
Petrarch, by his own account, first saw Laura in an Avignon church in 1327. He went on writing poems about her for some forty years, most of them sonnets.
Q 28How many morae, or sound units, does a traditional Japanese haiku contain?
17
17 is a count of morae, not syllables, and morae are shorter: one English syllable can hold two or three, so 'haibun' is two syllables in English but four morae in Japanese.
Q 29A traditional haiku includes a kigo, a word or phrase that signals what?
The season
The season: cherry blossom means spring, cicadas summer. Japanese poets look such words up in a saijiki, an almanac that lists them by time of year with example poems.
Q 30In a Japanese haiku, what is a kireji?
A cutting word
A cutting word such as 'ya' breaks a haiku in two or brings it to a firm close. English has no equivalent, so translators often reach for a dash or an ellipsis.