Famous Georges
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50 free Famous Georges trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
George has been a name for presidents and kings, for a Beatle, a heavyweight champion, the creator of Star Wars and a long line of novelists, composers, inventors and comedians. It comes from a Greek word for a farmer, which makes its record of rulers and rock stars all the more impressive. This quiz gathers the most famous Georges in one place. Some questions give you a clue and a set of people who share the name, so you have to tell one George from another. Others start with a well-known George, such as Washington, Harrison, Lucas, Foreman or Gershwin, and ask what he did, who he worked with or what he left behind. A handful of fictional Georges, French Georges and stars who were born a George but became famous under another name round things out. It suits pub quiz hosts looking for a themed round, anyone celebrating the George in the family, and general knowledge fans who like history, music, film, science and sport mixed together. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you learn something even from the ones you miss.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which baseball slugger, christened George Herman in Baltimore in 1895, learned to play at a Catholic reform school?
Babe Ruth
Babe Ruth was coached at St. Mary's Industrial School by Brother Matthias, the prefect of discipline, whose hitting and running style his own came to resemble.
Q 02Swiss engineer George de Mestral invented which fastener after burrs clung to his dog's fur on a 1941 hunting trip?
Velcro
Velcro takes its name from two French words, velours for velvet and crochet for hook, which describe the two strips that grip each other.
Q 03George Harrison co-founded HandMade Films in 1978 to rescue which Monty Python comedy after EMI pulled its funding?
Life of Brian
Life of Brian was saved by a fan: Harrison and his business partner raised about £3 million after the original backer quit just days before filming.
Q 04Comedian George Carlin hosted the very first episode of which long-running American sketch show in October 1975?
Saturday Night Live
Saturday Night Live opened with Carlin doing only stand-up: at his own request, he did not appear in any of the sketches.
Q 05A popular myth wrongly claims that George Washington wore dentures carved from which material?
Wood
Wood was never used: his dentures combined hippopotamus ivory, brass, gold and human teeth, and his accounts record a 1784 payment to enslaved people for nine teeth.
Q 06Former US president George H. W. Bush celebrated his 80th, 85th and 90th birthdays by doing which daring activity?
Skydiving
Skydiving was nothing new to him: as a young Navy pilot in World War II he bailed out of his stricken bomber and was rescued by a submarine.
Q 07George Weah, the AC Milan striker who won the 1995 Ballon d'Or, was later elected president of which country?
Liberia
Liberia swore him in as president in January 2018, making him the first African former professional footballer to become a head of state.
Q 08Filmmaker George Lucas named which adventure movie hero after the Alaskan Malamute he owned in the 1970s?
Indiana Jones
Indiana Jones took the dog's name, and the same big shaggy pet was the model for the Star Wars character Chewbacca.
Q 09The creators of Curious George fled which European capital by bicycle in June 1940, carrying the manuscript with them?
Paris
Paris was about to fall to the German army when H. A. and Margret Rey, a Jewish couple, rode out on bicycles they had built themselves.
Q 10George Foreman lost his heavyweight title to Muhammad Ali in the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle, staged in which country?
Zaire
Zaire's ruler Mobutu Sese Seko agreed to host the fight for the publicity it would bring, and Foreman won a world title back in 1994, aged 45.
Q 11King George III bought which London residence as a private family home for his wife, Queen Charlotte?
Buckingham Palace
Buckingham Palace was then plain Buckingham House, soon known as The Queen's House, and 14 of the couple's 15 children were born there.
Q 12King George V renamed Britain's royal house in 1917, dropping the German-sounding Saxe-Coburg and Gotha for which name?
Windsor
Windsor was borrowed from the royal castle at a moment when German Gotha bombers were raiding London and anti-German feeling was at its peak.
Q 13Which actor won an Oscar for playing the stammering George VI, Britain's wartime monarch, in a 2010 film?
Colin Firth
Q 21Which English novelist, born Eric Blair, took a pen name from a Suffolk river and wrote Animal Farm?
George Orwell
George Orwell took his first name from England's patron saint, and he wrote his last novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, on the remote Scottish island of Jura.
Q 22Which Victorian novelist, born Mary Ann Evans, published Middlemarch and Silas Marner under a man's name?
George Eliot
George Eliot scandalised Victorian society by living for 24 years with the married critic George Henry Lewes, whom she called her husband.
Q 23French novelist George Sand, born Aurore Dupin, spent the winter of 1838 on Mallorca with which composer, her lover?
Frédéric Chopin
Colin Firth played the reluctant monarch in The King's Speech, opposite Geoffrey Rush as Lionel Logue, the Australian therapist who became his friend.
Q 14King George II became the last British monarch to lead his troops into battle at which 1743 clash with the French?
Dettingen
Dettingen saw the 59-year-old king lead an allied army of British, Hanoverian and Austrian troops to victory during the War of the Austrian Succession.
Q 15According to legend, Saint George, the patron saint of England, saved a king's daughter by slaying which creature?
A dragon
A dragon appears nowhere in the earliest accounts of his life: the story was a later addition, first recorded in the 11th century.
Q 16Before entering politics as a state governor, George W. Bush was managing partner of which Major League Baseball team?
Texas Rangers
Texas Rangers shares that he bought with a group of investors in 1989 brought him over $15 million when he sold them in 1998.
Q 17George Armstrong Custer, who graduated last in his West Point class, was killed in 1876 at which battle?
Little Bighorn
Little Bighorn cost Custer his life along with every soldier in the five companies he led against a coalition of Native American tribes in Montana.
Q 18Which actor became the first to decline the Best Actor Oscar, awarded for playing the title general in Patton?
George C. Scott
George C. Scott had warned the Academy months in advance that he would refuse, because he believed performances cannot be compared with one another.
Q 19English climber George Mallory vanished in 1924 near the summit of which mountain, where his body was found in 1999?
Mount Everest
Mount Everest kept his body for 75 years, and nobody knows whether he and his partner Sandy Irvine reached the top before they died.
Q 20Tuskegee scientist George Washington Carver published a 1916 bulletin giving 105 ways of preparing which crop as food?
Peanuts
Peanuts made him a celebrity after he testified to Congress in 1921, though he is often wrongly credited with inventing peanut butter.
Frédéric Chopin and Sand lodged that winter in a formerly abandoned Carthusian monastery at Valldemossa, where the cold and damp made his illness worse.
Q 24George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, about a flower seller's elocution lessons, became which 1956 Broadway musical?
My Fair Lady
My Fair Lady is a romanticized version of the play, whose 1938 film screenplay earned Shaw an Academy Award to go with his Nobel Prize in Literature.
Q 25George R. R. Martin's fantasy novels of Westeros, A Song of Ice and Fire, were adapted as which HBO series?
Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones ran for eight seasons, while Martin kept writing the books in WordStar on an old MS-DOS computer to avoid spell-checkers and distractions.
Q 26George Gershwin composed which 1935 opera set in Catfish Row, a Black neighbourhood of Charleston, South Carolina?
Porgy and Bess
Porgy and Bess opened with a cast of classically trained African-American singers, a daring choice in 1935, and its lullaby Summertime became a standard.
Q 27George Frideric Handel's oratorio Messiah, home of the Hallelujah chorus, was first performed in 1742 in which city?
Dublin
Dublin heard it first at a charity concert, which raised money for prisoners' debt relief and two of the city's hospitals.
Q 28French composer Georges Bizet died in 1875, three months after which opera shocked and scandalised its first audiences?
Carmen
Carmen became one of the world's most performed operas, but Bizet died of a heart attack at 36, unaware that it would ever succeed.
Q 29Painter Georges Seurat, creator of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, pioneered which technique?
Pointillism
Pointillism builds colour from tiny dots that blend in the viewer's eye, though Seurat himself preferred to call his method Divisionism.
Q 30George Michael, once half of a pop duo with Andrew Ridgeley, won the Album of the Year Grammy for which solo debut?
Faith
Faith has sold over 25 million copies, and Michael wrote and produced every track on it himself except one, which he co-wrote with a friend.