Guess the Year Trivia
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60 free Guess the Year trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Guess the year trivia is the simplest quiz format there is: here is an event, when did it happen? It is also one of the hardest, because everyone knows the Berlin Wall fell 'in the eighties' and almost nobody is sure which year. This quiz gives you fifty-nine events across two thousand years and four possible years for each. Some are anchors you should know cold (the moon landing, the Titanic, Pearl Harbor); some are the ones people get wrong by a year or two (Chernobyl, the first iPhone, the euro coins arriving); a few are genuinely hard (the first Super Bowl, Windows 95, New Zealand's vote for women). The distractors are always plausible neighbouring years, so this works well as a pub-quiz round or a family game where players write down their guess before seeing the options. Each answer comes with a one-line explanation that adds a detail worth remembering, and the set is balanced so that the middle option is not the safe bet. Every date was checked against encyclopaedic reference pages before publishing, and each question carries a citation to the page that gives it.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which year did the Berlin Wall fall?
1989
1989: the Wall came down on 9 November during the Peaceful Revolution, after a botched press briefing sent crowds to the crossings and the guards gave way.
Q 02In which year did the Titanic sink?
1912
1912: she struck an iceberg on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York and sank in the early hours of 15 April.
Q 03In which year was the first iPhone released?
2007
2007: Steve Jobs unveiled it on 9 January as three devices in one, an iPod, a phone and an internet communicator, and it went on sale in June.
Q 04In which year did Apollo 11 land the first humans on the Moon?
1969
1969: with the computer steering Eagle toward a boulder field, Armstrong took over and flew past it, landing on 20 July with under a minute of fuel left.
Q 05In which year did reactor 4 explode at the Chernobyl nuclear plant?
1986
1986: reactor 4 exploded on 26 April during a botched safety test, near the town of Pripyat in what is now Ukraine.
Q 06In which year did King John seal Magna Carta at Runnymede?
1215
1215: the 'Great Charter' was sealed on 15 June at Runnymede, near Windsor, and King John soon persuaded the Pope to annul it.
Q 07In which year did Christopher Columbus make his first voyage across the Atlantic?
1492
1492: when he landed in the Bahamas on 12 October, Columbus believed he had reached the East Indies near Asia.
Q 08In which year was the Bastille stormed in Paris?
1789
1789: the 14 July attack on the fortress-prison became France's national day, Bastille Day, commemorated from 1880 onward.
Q 09In which year was the Battle of Hastings fought?
1066
1066: William of Normandy beat Harold Godwinson on 14 October and the Norman Conquest of England began.
Q 10In which year was the United States Declaration of Independence adopted?
1776
1776: Congress adopted the text on 4 July, ordered the engrossed copy on 19 July, and most delegates signed it on 2 August.
Q 11In which year did the Wright Flyer make the first sustained powered flight?
1903
1903: Wilbur won a coin toss for the first try on 14 December but stalled, so Orville made the first successful flight three days later.
Q 12In which year was Facebook founded?
2004
2004: Mark Zuckerberg launched it from Harvard on 4 February as TheFacebook, and at first only Harvard students could join.
Q 13In which year was Google founded?
1998
1998: Larry Page and Sergey Brin first built the search engine in their Stanford dorm rooms as BackRub, then incorporated Google in a Menlo Park garage.
Q 14In which year did the First World War begin?
Q 21In which year was the Battle of Waterloo?
1815
1815: fought on Sunday 18 June near a village then in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands and now in Belgium, it was Napoleon's last battle.
Q 22In which year did the Wall Street Crash begin?
1929
1929: prices on the New York Stock Exchange collapsed in late October, with Black Thursday on the 24th and Black Tuesday on the 29th, ushering in the Great Depression.
Q 23In which year was President John F. Kennedy assassinated?
1963
1963: he was shot in Dallas on 22 November, and two days later his accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself shot dead by Jack Ruby.
In which year was the Eiffel Tower completed?
1914
1914: Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July, a month after Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.
Q 15In which year did Japan attack Pearl Harbor?
1941
1941: the surprise raid on the US Pacific Fleet at Oahu came on 7 December, and the United States declared war on Japan the next day.
Q 16In which year did Nazi Germany's surrender bring the war in Europe to an end?
1945
1945: General Alfred Jodl signed Germany's unconditional surrender at Reims on 7 May, and VE Day was celebrated the next day.
Q 17In which year was Nelson Mandela released from prison?
1990
1990: President F. W. de Klerk freed him on 11 February after 27 years, having unbanned the ANC nine days earlier.
Q 18In which year did euro coins and banknotes enter circulation?
2002
2002: the euro had existed as an accounting currency since 1999; the notes and coins arrived on 1 January and had replaced the old currencies by the end of February.
Q 19In which year was the Great Fire of London?
1666
1666: it burned from Sunday 2 to Wednesday 5 September, starting in Thomas Farriner's bakery on Pudding Lane and gutting the medieval City.
Q 20In which year did William Shakespeare die?
1616
1616: he died on 23 April, traditionally also his birthday, aged 52, and was buried in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon.
1889
1889: Gustave Eiffel's company finished it in March after just over two years' work, in time for that year's Exposition Universelle.
Q 25In which year was the Statue of Liberty dedicated?
1886
1886: President Grover Cleveland dedicated it on 28 October, and its hidden iron framework was designed by Gustave Eiffel.
Q 26In which year did the Suez Canal officially open?
1869
1869: Britain had opposed the French-led canal, then bought Egypt's shares in it six years after it opened.
Q 27In which year did Krakatoa erupt catastrophically?
1883
1883: the climactic eruption in the Sunda Strait came on 26-27 August, after months of activity from May, and its tsunamis killed tens of thousands.
Q 28In which year did Mount Vesuvius bury Pompeii?
AD 79
AD 79: the eruption buried Pompeii and Herculaneum under ash and pyroclastic flows; Pliny the Younger's two letters to Tacitus describe it.
Q 29In which year was Julius Caesar assassinated?
44 BC
44 BC: he was stabbed on the Ides of March, 15 March, by a group of senators at the Curia of Pompey in Rome.
Q 30In which year were the first modern Olympic Games held, in Athens?
1896
1896: the Games of the I Olympiad ran from 6 to 15 April in Athens, revived by Pierre de Coubertin's International Olympic Committee.