100 free Grammar trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 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 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Traditional grammar divides English words into how many parts of speech?
Eight
Noun, pronoun, adjective, adverb, verb, preposition, conjunction and interjection; modern grammars add determiners and others.
Q 02Which part of speech expresses emotion, as in 'oops'?
An interjection
A conjunction connects words or clauses, and an adverb describes a verb, adjective or another adverb.
Q 03Roughly how many irregular verbs does English have?
About 100 to 200
Regular verbs take -ed for both past tense and participle; the irregular ones include the most common verbs in the language.
Q 04'Went' was originally the past tense of which verb before it was borrowed by 'go'?
Wend
The process is called suppletion, and it is why 'go' has such a strange past tense.
Q 05Which four moods does English have?
Indicative, imperative, conditional and subjunctive
Ancient Greek also had an optative mood, and Arabic a jussive.
Q 06'If I were the teacher, I would not give too much homework' is an example of which mood?
The subjunctive
Fixed phrases like 'God save the King' and 'be that as it may' preserve the same construction.
Q 07Which English modal verbs make up the core set?
Can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would
Ought, had better, and sometimes dare and need are counted as marginal modals.
Q 08The serial comma is nicknamed after Horace Hart, who wrote the style rules for which publishing house?
Oxford University Press
Hart's Rules for Compositors and Readers of 1905 became the press's house style guide.
Q 09A missing serial comma decided a Maine overtime lawsuit that settled for how much in 2017?
$5 million
Truck drivers argued that 'packing for shipment or distribution' was ambiguous without the comma, and the court agreed.
Q 10The Star Trek phrase 'to boldly go' is the classic example of what?
A split infinitive
Henry Alford's 1864 Plea for the Queen's English helped make the construction taboo, though Fowler and others 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
It is apocryphally attributed to Winston Churchill; the rule itself dates to John Dryden's 1672 objection to a Ben Jonson line.
Q 12Which poet's 1672 complaint about a Ben Jonson phrase made preposition-stranding a grammatical sin?
John Dryden
Grammarian Joshua Poole had grumbled about it earlier in the 17th century, but Dryden made it fashionable to object.
Q 13The word apostrophe comes from Greek meaning what?
Turning away or elision
Q 21The ampersand was long taught to children as what?
The 27th letter of the alphabet
The symbol itself is a ligature of the Latin word et.
Q 22The palindrome 'Able was I ere I saw Elba' was implausibly attributed to whom?
Napoleon
It was coined by a certain 'J.T.R.' in 1848; 'A man, a plan, a canal – Panama' followed in 1948.
Q 23According to Guinness, what is the world's longest palindromic term in everyday use?
The 19-letter Finnish word saippuakivikauppias
Geoffroy Tory introduced it into French printing in 1529 to show a dropped vowel, as in l'heure.
Q 14What is the superfluous mark in market signs like 'apple's 50p' commonly called?
The greengrocers' apostrophe
The Apostrophe Protection Society campaigned against them from 2001 until it gave up in 2019.
Q 15Who founded the Apostrophe Protection Society in 2001, and what happened to it?
Retired journalist John Richards; it closed in 2019
Its founder was awarded an Ig Nobel prize for his efforts.
Q 16The semicolon first appears in a 1496 book by Pietro Bembo, printed by which Venetian printer?
Aldus Manutius
Manutius's press also gave the world italic type and the pocket-sized book.
Q 17What is Project Semicolon?
An anti-suicide initiative and tattoo
The idea is that a semicolon continues a sentence rather than ending it, so the tattoo is usually on the wrist.
Q 18The interrobang, combining a question mark and an exclamation point, was proposed in 1962 by whom?
Advertising executive Martin Speckter
He thought ads would look better with a single mark for surprised rhetorical questions; some Remington typewriters got a key for it in 1968.
Q 19What is the upside-down interrobang called?
Gnaborretni
It serves Spanish, which opens questions and exclamations with inverted marks.
Q 20The name ampersand comes from schoolchildren slurring which phrase?
'And per se and'
The & sign was once taught as the 27th letter of the alphabet, and the slurred name was in common use by 1837.
It means a soapstone vendor; the longest English one, tattarrattat, comes from Joyce's Ulysses.
Q 24Which musician's song 'Bob' is composed entirely of palindromes?
'Weird Al' Yankovic
It parodies Dylan's 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' with lines like 'Do geese see God?'
Q 25'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' is the best-known example of what?
A pangram
It contains 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
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
Other names include auto-antonym and Janus word, after the two-faced Roman god; 'sanction' and 'cleave' 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
'Fast' can mean fixed in place or moving quickly, and 'left' once meant both lucky and unlucky.
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
Its 1993 edition listed Addison, Austen, Chesterfield, Fielding, Ruskin, Scott and Shakespeare.