Grammar Trivia
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129 free Grammar trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
44 free Grammar trivia questions with answers. Grammar arguments never end, and this quiz collects the best of them. It covers the parts of speech and moods, the great usage feuds (the Oxford comma lawsuit, the split infinitive, prepositions at the end of sentences, fewer versus less, singular they), the punctuation marks and their inventors (Aldus Manutius's semicolon, Speckter's interrobang, the ampersand as 27th letter), and the wordplay: palindromes, pangrams, contronyms, portmanteaus, garden-path sentences and the eight-word Buffalo sentence. Easy questions are for anyone who remembers school English. Harder ones ask who first proposed the fewer/less rule, what the upside-down interrobang is called, which Finnish word is the longest palindrome, and which linguist took Strunk and White apart. It suits a teachers' lounge, a word-nerd party or a general-knowledge round. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the constructions, marks and books involved, and each question carries its source.
30 of 129 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Traditional grammar divides English words into how many parts of speech?
Eight
Traditional school grammar counts eight parts of speech, among them noun, verb, adjective and preposition; modern grammars add determiners and divide the classes differently.
Q 02Which part of speech expresses emotion, as in 'oops'?
An interjection
'Oops' is an interjection, a word that expresses sudden emotion and stands outside the grammar of the sentence, often followed by an exclamation mark.
Q 03Roughly how many irregular verbs does English have?
About 100 to 200
English has only about 100 to 200 irregular verbs, but among them are its commonest verbs, such as be, have and say; regular verbs simply add -ed for past tense and participle.
Q 04'Went' was originally the past tense of which verb before it was borrowed by 'go'?
Wend
'Went' was originally the past tense of 'wend', meaning to make one's way; 'go' adopted it by the 1500s, a process grammarians call suppletion.
Q 05'The cake was eaten by the dog' is in which grammatical voice?
The passive voice
'The cake was eaten by the dog' is in the passive voice: the subject receives the action, and the verb combines a form of 'be' with a past participle.
Q 06Which mood does the verb 'were' show in 'If I were the teacher'?
The subjunctive
'If I were' uses the subjunctive, the mood for hypothetical or wished-for situations; fixed phrases such as 'God save the King' and 'be that as it may' preserve it.
Q 07Which English modal verbs make up the core set?
Can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would
The nine core modals are can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would; ought to, had better, dare and need count as marginal modals because each behaves only partly like a modal.
Q 08The serial comma takes its nickname from which publishing house, whose printer Horace Hart prescribed it?
Oxford University Press
The 'Oxford comma' is named for Oxford University Press, where printer Horace Hart's 'Rules for Compositors and Readers', first printed in 1893, made the serial comma house style.
Q 09A missing serial comma won Maine dairy drivers an overtime settlement of how much?
$5 million
Oakhurst Dairy drivers won a $5 million settlement in 2018 after the First Circuit ruled in 2017 that 'packing for shipment or distribution', lacking a serial comma, was ambiguous.
Q 10The Star Trek phrase 'to boldly go' is the classic example of what?
A split infinitive
'To boldly go' is a split infinitive, an adverb wedged between 'to' and its verb; Henry Alford's 1864 'A Plea for the Queen's English' helped make it taboo, though Fowler defended it.
Q 11The quip 'This is the sort of tedious nonsense up with which I will not put' mocks which supposed rule?
Never end a sentence with a preposition
The quip mocks the rule 'never end a sentence with a preposition'; it is apocryphally attributed to Winston Churchill, but its earliest known printing, in 1942, names no author.
Q 12Which poet's 1672 complaint about a Ben Jonson phrase made preposition-stranding a grammatical sin?
John Dryden
John Dryden's 1672 'Defence of the Epilogue' faulted a Ben Jonson line for ending in a preposition; Joshua Poole had grumbled earlier, but Dryden made objecting fashionable.
Q 13The word apostrophe comes from Greek meaning what?
Q 21The ampersand was long taught to children as what?
The 27th letter of the alphabet
Schoolchildren once recited the ampersand as the 27th letter of the alphabet, chanting it after Z; the symbol itself began as a ligature of the letters e and t in the word 'et'.
Q 22The palindrome 'Able was I ere I saw Elba' was implausibly attributed to whom?
Napoleon
The line was implausibly attributed to Napoleon, exiled on Elba in 1814; it was actually coined by a certain 'J.T.R.' in 1848, a century before 'A man, a plan, a canal – Panama'.
Q 23According to Guinness, what is the world's longest palindromic term in everyday use?
Turning away or elision
Apostrophe comes from apostrophos, 'turning away or elision', a mark for a dropped letter; Geoffroy Tory brought it into French printing in 1529 for forms such as l'heure.
Q 14What is the superfluous mark in market signs like 'apple's 50p' commonly called?
The greengrocers' apostrophe
'Apple's 50p' shows the greengrocers' apostrophe, a stray apostrophe in a plural; the name, from fruit-stall price signs, was popularised by Lynne Truss's 2003 bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
Q 15Who founded the Apostrophe Protection Society in 2001, and what happened to it?
Retired journalist John Richards; it closed in 2019
The society's founder was retired journalist John Richards; it closed in 2019 when he declared that ignorance and laziness had won, 18 years after his campaign earned a 2001 Ig Nobel Prize for Literature.
Q 16The semicolon first appears in a 1496 book by Pietro Bembo, printed by which Venetian printer?
Aldus Manutius
Aldus Manutius printed Bembo's De Aetna in 1496 with the first semicolon; his press also introduced italic type in 1501 and the pocket-sized octavo book.
Q 17What is Project Semicolon?
An anti-suicide initiative and tattoo
Project Semicolon, founded by Amy Bleuel in 2013, is an anti-suicide initiative and tattoo: a semicolon marks where an author could have ended a sentence but chose to continue, often inked on the wrist.
Q 18The interrobang, combining a question mark and an exclamation point, was proposed in 1962 by whom?
Advertising executive Martin Speckter
Advertising executive Martin Speckter proposed the interrobang in 1962 in the magazine TYPEtalks, wanting one mark for a question asked in surprise or disbelief; Remington typewriters offered a key for it in 1968.
Q 19What is the upside-down interrobang called?
Gnaborretni
The inverted interrobang is the gnaborretni, 'interrobang' spelled backwards; it opens sentences in languages that use inverted question and exclamation marks, and Unicode gives it its own code point.
Q 20The name ampersand comes from schoolchildren slurring which phrase?
'And per se and'
Reciting the alphabet, children ended with 'and per se and', meaning '& by itself is and', and the phrase slurred into ampersand, a word recorded by 1837.
The 19-letter Finnish word saippuakivikauppias
Guinness lists the 19-letter Finnish word saippuakivikauppias, a soapstone dealer, as the longest palindrome in everyday use; the longest in English, tattarrattat, comes from Joyce's Ulysses.
Q 24Which musician's song 'Bob' is composed entirely of palindromes?
'Weird Al' Yankovic
'Bob', from 'Weird Al' Yankovic's 2003 album Poodle Hat, parodies Dylan's 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' with palindromic lines such as 'Do geese see God?'
Q 25'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' is the best-known example of what?
A pangram
'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' is a pangram, a sentence containing every letter of the alphabet, which is why typewriter tests and font samples use it.
Q 26Which 32-letter pangram, with only six duplicated vowels, is often cited as among the most efficient?
Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs
'Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs' covers the alphabet in 32 letters, its only repeats being six vowels; a perfect pangram uses each letter exactly once, which in English requires obscure words.
Q 27A word like 'dust', which can mean both to remove dust and to add it, is called what?
A contronym
'Dust' is a contronym, a word with two opposite meanings; 'sanction' (permit or penalise) and 'cleave' (split or cling) are classic examples.
Q 28Why is a word with two opposite meanings also called a Janus word?
After the Roman god usually shown with two faces
A Janus word is named after the Roman god usually shown with two faces, looking both ways like its two meanings; 'fast' can mean fixed in place or moving quickly.
Q 29Which pronoun did Merriam-Webster name Word of the Year in 2019?
They
The American Dialect Society had chosen singular they in 2015 and named it Word of the Decade for the 2010s.
Q 30The Chicago Manual of Style cited singular they's 'venerable use' by which of these writers?
Austen and Shakespeare
The 1993 edition's list of authors with a venerable use of singular they included Austen and Shakespeare, alongside Addison, Chesterfield, Fielding, Ruskin and Scott.