Figurative Language
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50 free Figurative Language trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Figurative language is how we say one thing and mean another: love becomes a rose, a slow queue lasts forever, and the wind starts whispering. We use it constantly, usually without noticing, which is what makes it fun to be quizzed on. This quiz tests the devices students meet most often (simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbole, idiom, alliteration, onomatopoeia and oxymoron) alongside a few that only keen readers can label. You will pick the simile out of a line-up, finish well-worn sayings, trace idioms back to fables and old superstitions, and match famous lines from poems, plays, films and speeches to the writers behind them. It works as a classroom review for middle and high school English, a printable multiple-choice worksheet with answers, or a quick challenge for anyone who loves words. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you learn why a phrase counts as one device and not another.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which breakfast cereal's mascots Snap, Crackle and Pop take their names from onomatopoeia in a radio ad?
Rice Krispies
Rice Krispies briefly had a fourth elf in the 1950s named Pow. The original trio were drawn in the early 1930s as elderly gnomes with large noses, ears and hats.
Q 02Which character from a London pronunciation book 'picked a peck of pickled peppers' in a classic alliteration?
Peter Piper
Peter Piper may have been a real person: some authors identify him as Pierre Poivre, an 18th-century administrator of Mauritius who studied growing spices in the Seychelles.
Q 03Which boxer's two-simile motto, coined by cornerman Bundini Brown, was 'Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee'?
Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali's motto came from a poem by Drew Bundini Brown, his assistant trainer, and it went on: 'rumble, young man, rumble.'
Q 04Which personification of death, named in English since the 1800s, is usually shown as a robed skeleton with a scythe?
The Grim Reaper
The Grim Reaper is younger than he looks: the earliest known use of the name in English is in an 1847 book, although a skeletal Death with a scythe goes back to the late Middle Ages.
Q 05Which idiom do actors say before a show because wishing 'good luck' aloud is thought to bring bad luck?
Break a leg
Break a leg has a ballet rival: professional dancers do not say it, and wish each other 'merde' instead, a habit some theatre people have picked up too.
Q 06Which farm animals fly in an English idiom, said to come from a Scottish proverb, for something that will never happen?
Pigs
Pigs fly in an adynaton, a hyperbole pushed so far that it describes an impossibility. Romanian has the same idiom, plus another that puts things off until 'horses' Easter'.
Q 07Which tradesman completes the simile 'as mad as a…', a phrase often linked to mercury poisoning in his trade?
Hatter
Hatter came long before Wonderland: the phrase was in print by 1829, decades before Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Its true origin is still uncertain.
Q 08Which film's title character sits at a bus stop quoting the simile 'life was like a box of chocolates'?
Forrest Gump
Forrest Gump finishes the comparison with 'you never know what you're gonna get', a line ranked 40th on the American Film Institute's list of 100 movie quotes.
Q 09The English idiom 'kick the bucket', which Polish speakers render as 'kick the calendar', means to do what?
To die
To die is also what Italians mean by 'pulling the leathers', which shows why an idiom rarely survives a word-for-word translation.
Q 10Which seafood phrase is often cited as an oxymoron because its first word seems to contradict its second?
Jumbo shrimp
Jumbo shrimp is a common example, and the word 'oxymoron' is one itself: it joins the Greek for 'sharp' and 'dull', as if to say 'pointedly foolish'.
Q 11Which of these everyday phrases is a simile, a device whose name comes from the Latin word for 'like'?
Poor as a church mouse
Poor as a church mouse spells out its comparison with 'as'. Drop the linking word, as in 'Odysseus is a weasel', and the same kind of idea becomes a metaphor.
Q 12Which of these remarks about a suitcase is hyperbole, a device that rhetoric also calls auxesis?
It weighs a ton
It weighs a ton is not meant to be believed: in casual speech hyperbole simply works as an intensifier, a vivid way of saying 'extremely heavy'.
Q 13Which of these body words is an onomatopoeia, coined in the 1500s to imitate the sound it names?
Hiccup
Q 21The idiom 'spill the beans', said to recall an ancient way of voting with beans in jars, means to do what?
Reveal a secret
Reveal a secret is the meaning, first attested in 1919. In the old story, knocking over a jar of voting beans gave the result away too early.
Q 22In A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens begins by declaring old Marley 'as dead as' which piece of ironmongery?
A door-nail
A door-nail puzzles even the narrator, who admits he would have called a coffin-nail 'the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade'. Langland used the same simile in the 1300s.
Q 23Which animal in the Aesop fable behind the idiom 'sour grapes' decides the fruit it cannot reach is not worth having?
Fox
Hiccup was spelled 'hickop' by the 1570s, after the earlier 'hicket', each a word meant to mimic the jolt itself. The spelling 'hiccough' came later, from a mistaken link with 'cough'.
Q 14The joke 'I wondered why the ball was getting bigger, then it hit me' depends on which kind of wordplay?
A pun
A pun works here because 'it hit me' means both 'I realised' and 'the ball struck me'. The formal name for the habit is paronomasia.
Q 15Saying a worker was 'let go' rather than 'fired' is which device, whose Greek name means 'words of good omen'?
Euphemism
Euphemism was once a euphemism itself: the ancient Greeks used the term to mean keeping a holy silence, speaking well by not speaking at all.
Q 16In Carl Sandburg's much-taught metaphor, written as an 'American haiku', what 'comes on little cat feet'?
The fog
The fog caught Sandburg's eye over Chicago harbor on his way to interview a judge. Kept waiting forty minutes, he wrote the poem on a piece of newsprint.
Q 17Which Shakespeare comedy gives the melancholy Jaques the much-quoted metaphor 'All the world's a stage'?
As You Like It
As You Like It has Jaques stretch the idea across a whole speech, comparing life to a play and cataloguing the seven ages of man.
Q 18Which Shakespeare tragedy has a lovesick hero reel off oxymorons like 'loving hate', 'cold fire' and 'sick health'?
Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet has Romeo string together thirteen in a row in the opening scene, among them 'heavy lightness', 'bright smoke' and 'feather of lead'.
Q 19Which American poet personified Death as a gentleman caller with a carriage who 'kindly stopped for me'?
Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson never authorised the poem for print: it appeared in 1890, after she had died, under the title 'The Chariot'.
Q 20Which monster-slaying hero gives his name to an Old English epic of 3,182 lines bound together by alliteration?
Beowulf
Beowulf's poet tied the two halves of every line together with matching initial sounds, the usual verse form of Old English, where a pause splits each line in two.
Fox logic has travelled well: similar expressions exist in other languages of Europe and Asia, sometimes with a different fruit hanging out of reach.
Q 24Which Greek hero's heel names a person's one fatal weak spot, a figure of speech in English only since the 1800s?
Achilles
Achilles lent his heel to English surprisingly late: as an expression for a vulnerable spot it dates only to 1840, although Coleridge had hinted at it in 1810.
Q 25Which salad ingredient completes the simile 'as cool as a…', used since the 1700s for someone calm under pressure?
Cucumber
Cucumber has kept its cool for three centuries: the comparison was in print by 1731, in a volume of Miscellanies issued by Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope.
Q 26The word 'metaphor', which is itself a metaphor, comes from a Greek verb with which literal meaning?
To carry over
To carry over is the sense of the Greek 'metapherō': a metaphor moves a label from one thing to another, and the Greek noun behind it literally means 'transference'.
Q 27Which reptile's 'tears' mean a fake show of grief, from an old belief that it weeps while eating its prey?
Crocodile
Crocodile eyes do water, typically to stay moist after a long time out of the water. Doctors borrowed the legend to name a syndrome in which patients shed tears while eating.
Q 28Which smoked fish names a misleading clue, after William Cobbett's tale of using one to pull hounds off a scent?
Herring
Herring cured until reddish-brown smelled strong enough to distract a pack, or so Cobbett claimed in 1807. His tale was probably invented, yet it likely gave English the idiom.
Q 29Which bird's flight names the most direct route between two points, in an idiom Dickens used in Oliver Twist?
Crow
Crow flight is not really that direct: the birds cross open country alone but often circle above their nests.
Q 30In the Christmas poem 'A Visit from St. Nicholas', a simile compares St. Nick's nose to which fruit?
A cherry
A cherry for the nose, roses for the cheeks and a beard 'as white as the snow': the similes pile up in a poem first published anonymously in a Troy, New York newspaper.