Etymology Trivia
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178 free Etymology trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This etymology trivia quiz is about where words come from: the people, places, myths and foreign tongues hiding inside everyday English. The easy questions are the famous eponyms and loanwords: the earl behind the sandwich, the Czech play that gave us robot, the atoll that named the bikini, the Persian chess phrase behind checkmate and the goddess inside cereal. From there it gets harder: the Venetian forty days of quarantine, the mouse in muscle, the salt in salary, the fig-revealer sycophant, the painted porch of the Stoics, the Massachusetts governor turned gerrymander, the finance minister who became a silhouette, the Ottawa word behind chipmunk, the Taíno roots of hammock and barbecue, the Hindi origins of shampoo and pyjamas, the Yiddish glitch and the Japanese tycoon. There are also questions on the vocabulary of etymology itself: eponyms, portmanteaus, back-formations, folk etymology and loanwords. If you want the wider science of language, our Linguistics quiz covers that ground. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry for the word, person or place in question before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question.
30 of 178 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Greek root of 'etymology', etymos, means what?
True
Etymos is Greek for 'true' or 'real'; etymon meant a word's true sense, and with -logia, 'study of', it gives etymology, the study of a word's true origin.
Q 02What is the term for a noun after which something is named, like Elizabeth I for the Elizabethan era?
Eponym
An eponym can even name a stretch of time: the Assyrians named each year after a high official as early as the second millennium BC.
Q 03Which author first used 'portmanteau' for a blended word like smog or motel?
Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll: in Through the Looking-Glass (1871) Humpty Dumpty explains 'slithy' as two meanings packed into one word, like a two-compartment portmanteau suitcase.
Q 04Who coined the term 'back-formation' in 1889, using 'to burgle' from 'burglar' as an example?
James Murray
James Murray, chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary from 1879, coined 'back-formation' in 1889, citing 'burgle', a verb carved out of the older noun 'burglar'.
Q 05The word 'loanword' is itself what kind of borrowing?
A calque
'Loanword' is a calque, a word-for-word translation of German Lehnwort (Lehn 'loan' + Wort 'word'); 'calque' itself, fittingly, is a loanword from French.
Q 06Which 18th-century aristocrat gave his name to the sandwich?
John Montagu
John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich (1718–1792), reputedly asked for meat between slices of bread so he could keep eating at the gaming table without greasy fingers.
Q 07The word 'boycott' comes from a land agent shunned in which country in 1880?
Ireland
Ireland: Captain Charles Boycott, land agent for Lord Erne in County Mayo, was shunned by Land League tenants in 1880, and his surname became the word within months.
Q 08What does 'quarantine' literally mean, from the Venetian word quarantena?
Forty days
Quarantena means 'forty days': during later plague epidemics Venice made arriving ships wait forty days in isolation, lengthening the thirty-day trentino first imposed by Ragusa in 1377.
Q 09In which language did the word 'robot' originate in the 1920s?
Czech
Czech: Karel Čapek's 1920 play about manufactured workers spread the word, which he credited his brother Josef with coining from Czech robota, 'forced labour'.
Q 10Which poet coined 'pandemonium' as the name of the capital of Hell?
John Milton
John Milton coined 'Pandaemonium' in Paradise Lost (1667) as the name of Satan's capital, from Greek pan, 'all', and daimon, 'demon'.
Q 11Most reference works trace 'OK' to a late-1830s abbreviation fad in which city?
Boston
Boston: the Boston Morning Post printed 'o.k.' for 'oll korrect' on 23 March 1839, amid a newspaper fad for jokey misspelled abbreviations, as Allen Walker Read documented.
Q 12The bikini was named after an atoll where what had happened four days earlier?
A public nuclear bomb test
A public nuclear bomb test: the US detonated the Able bomb at Bikini Atoll on 1 July 1946, and Louis Réard unveiled his two-piece in Paris on 5 July.
Q 13The 'mate' in checkmate comes from a Persian phrase meaning what?
The king is helpless
Q 21Which word for self-love comes from a youth who pined for his own reflection?
Narcissism
Narcissism: in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Narcissus fell in love with his reflection in a pool and wasted away; Havelock Ellis applied his name to self-absorption in 1898.
Q 22The mausoleum takes its name from the tomb of King Mausolus at which ancient city?
Halicarnassus
Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum, Turkey): the tomb built around 350 BC for Mausolus, satrap of Caria, by his widow Artemisia was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
Q 23The word 'draconian' comes from a lawmaker of which ancient city?
Athens
Athens: Draco's law code of about 621 BC punished even trivial offences with death, so harsh that Solon repealed all of it but the homicide law a generation later.
Persian shāh māt means 'the king is helpless' (māt, 'at a loss, defeated'); the popular gloss 'the king is dead' comes from confusing it with Arabic māta, 'he died'.
Q 14Which English word derives from the name of the Roman goddess Ceres?
Cereal
Cereal comes from Latin cerealis, 'of Ceres', the Roman goddess of grain and the harvest; ceramic, cerebral and ceremony share only the spelling.
Q 15Which English word derives from the name of the goat-legged Greek god Pan?
Panic
Panic comes from Greek panikon, 'of Pan': the goat-legged god was believed to cause sudden groundless fear in flocks and travellers; panorama, pandemic and pantry merely share the spelling.
Q 16Which month is named after the two-faced Roman god of doorways?
January
January: Janus, the two-faced Roman god of doorways and beginnings, looks back at the old year and forward to the new; March, May and June honour Mars, Maia and Juno.
Q 17Thursday is the Germanic equivalent of the Roman day named for which god?
Jupiter
Jupiter: Latin dies Iovis, 'Jupiter's day', survives in French jeudi and Italian giovedì; Germanic peoples swapped in their own thunder god Thunor (Thor), giving Thursday.
Q 18Which English weekday is named after the god the Norse called Odin?
Wednesday
Wednesday: Old English Wōdnesdæg, 'Woden's day', honours the chief Anglo-Saxon god, whom the Norse called Óðinn (Odin) and whom the Romans equated with Mercury.
Q 19Which English word derives from the name of the Roman god Vulcan?
Volcano
Volcano: Vulcan was the Roman god of fire and the forge, and the Aeolian island of Vulcano, thought to be his chimney, gave Italian vulcano and English volcano.
Q 20The 'Atlantic Ocean' literally derives from what?
Sea of Atlas
Sea of Atlas: Herodotus called it Atlantis thalassa, 'sea of Atlas', after the Titan who held up the sky at the world's western edge, beside the Atlas Mountains.
Q 24The word 'ostracism' derives from what?
Pottery sherds used as voting tokens
Pottery sherds used as voting tokens: Athenians scratched a name on an ostrakon, a broken piece of pottery, and the man with the most votes was banished for ten years.
Q 25The traditional etymology of 'sycophant' makes it a revealer of what?
Figs
Figs: Greek sykophantēs joins sykon, 'fig', to phainein, 'to show'; the traditional story is of informers who denounced illegal fig exports from Athens, though the true origin is unclear.
Q 26The Greek root of 'sarcasm' means what?
To tear flesh
'To tear flesh', and also 'bite the lip in rage' or 'sneer'; 'sarcastic' does not appear in English until 1695.
Q 27The philosophical term 'cynic' derives from the Greek for which animal?
Dog
Dog: Greek kynikos, 'dog-like', from kyōn, was flung at Diogenes and the early Cynics for their shameless, street-living ways, and the name stuck.
Q 28Stoicism takes its name from what feature of the Athenian Agora?
A painted porch
A painted porch: Zeno of Citium taught around 300 BC at the Stoa Poikile, the 'Painted Porch' on the north side of the Athenian Agora, so his followers were called Stoics.
Q 29The word 'lyceum' comes from Aristotle's school beside a sanctuary of which god?
Apollo
Apollo: from 335 BC Aristotle taught at the Lyceum, a gymnasium beside the sanctuary of Apollo Lykeios in Athens, and the name later passed to schools and lecture halls.
Q 30'Muscle' comes from Latin musculus, the diminutive of what animal?
Mouse
Mouse: Latin musculus means 'little mouse', from mus; a flexing biceps was thought to look like a mouse moving under the skin, and Greek mys likewise meant both.