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50 free High School English trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
High-school English is the class where most of us met Macbeth, Gatsby and Atticus Finch, argued about what a poem 'really means', and were told, repeatedly, where a comma goes. It is also the knowledge that sticks: decades later people still remember the conch, the valley of ashes and the letter on Hester Prynne's chest, even after the essay rules have faded. These 50 questions spread across the syllabus rather than camping on one book: Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Orwell, Golding, Homer and Beowulf, Frost and Whitman, then the terms teachers test (devices, rhetoric, the shape of a sonnet), the grammar that trips everyone up, vocabulary with a story behind it, and the citation habits of a decent essay. Every answer comes with a one-line explanation that adds something the textbook left out. Play it to find out how much of tenth-grade English survived, hand it to a student as a revision round, or print it for a classroom quiz.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In the novel Frankenstein, which character carries the surname Frankenstein, a name popularly misapplied to another?
The creature's maker
The creature's maker, Victor Frankenstein of Geneva, is the one the name belongs to; the creature has no name at all, and the mix-up was already being mocked in print in 1908.
Q 02What was the real name of Mark Twain, whose pen name is a riverboat leadsman's cry for two fathoms of water?
Samuel Clemens
Samuel Clemens took the name from his years piloting Mississippi steamboats, where 'mark twain' meant the water was twelve feet deep and safe to pass.
Q 03How old is Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, whose age the Nurse counts to the day in her first scene?
13
Juliet is 13, two weeks short of her fourteenth birthday on Lammas Eve; Shakespeare cut the age from 16 in his source poem, and brides that young were about one in a thousand in his England.
Q 04In 'Wherefore art thou Romeo?', followed by 'deny thy father and refuse thy name', what does Juliet's 'wherefore' mean?
Why
Why is the meaning: Juliet is lamenting that Romeo is a Montague, not asking where he is, which is how the line gets played for laughs in parodies.
Q 05In Poe's The Raven, which single word is the bird's reply to every question the grieving speaker asks?
Nevermore
Nevermore is the raven's 'only stock and store', yet the speaker keeps asking questions he knows it will answer the same way, a self-torture Poe built the poem around.
Q 06Which verb for wiping out a large part of something began as a Roman army punishment killing one man in ten?
Decimate
Decimate comes from Latin decimatio, 'destruction of a tenth': a unit judged cowardly drew lots and every tenth man was clubbed to death by his own comrades, who were then put on barley rations.
Q 07What false name does Odysseus give the Cyclops Polyphemus, so that the blinded giant's calls for help go unanswered?
Nobody
Nobody is the name, so when Polyphemus roars that Nobody is hurting him, the other Cyclopes assume a god is to blame and advise him to pray.
Q 08Walt Whitman's 'O Captain! My Captain!' mourns which leader, whom the 1865 poem never actually names?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln's assassination moved Whitman, who never met him, to write four elegies; this one was his most popular poem in his lifetime and, naming no one, has been reused for other dead leaders.
Q 09In The Old Man and the Sea, what fish, longer than his skiff, tows Santiago out to sea for two nights?
A marlin
A marlin, harpooned on the third morning and lashed alongside, is then eaten by sharks on the way home, so Santiago lands only a skeleton from the catch of his life.
Q 10Which letter must Hester Prynne wear on her dress in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, her sentence for adultery?
A
A is the letter, and it outlives her: Hester's shared tombstone with Dimmesdale reads 'On a field, sable, the letter A, gules', heraldry for a red A on black.
Q 11In Animal Farm, which carthorse, sure that any problem can be solved by working harder, is sold to a knacker?
Boxer
Boxer collapses from overwork and Napoleon sells him for whisky money, while the animals are told the knacker's van had been bought by an animal hospital and simply not repainted.
Q 12In Nineteen Eighty-Four, where does Winston Smith work, rewriting old newspaper reports to fit the Party line?
Ministry of Truth
The Ministry of Truth, where Winston revises back issues of The Times, derives from the BBC's overseas service, which the real Ministry of Information controlled in wartime.
Q 13In The Catcher in the Rye, which word does the teenage hero pin on anyone fake, from his prep school to Hollywood?
Phony
Q 21Whose 1845 Narrative tells how his Baltimore mistress taught him the alphabet until her husband forbade it?
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass took Hugh Auld's ban as proof that reading was the way out of slavery, finished teaching himself by playing games with white neighbourhood children, and later taught fellow slaves on the Freeland plantation to read.
Q 22In The Diary of a Young Girl, what name does Anne Frank give the imaginary friend she addresses her entries to?
Kitty
Kitty was invented on 20 June 1942 as a surrogate friend, and the Anne Frank Foundation still fields theories that she was a real schoolmate, Kitty Egyedi, who herself believed the diary's Kitty was fictional.
Q 23Which Robert Frost poem began as a joke on his indecisive walking companion Edward Thomas?
Phony is the hero's verdict on everyone from his roommate to the film industry, which he calls the ultimate phoniness because it leaves no room for a writer's own imagination.
Q 14What does the number in the title Fahrenheit 451 refer to, according to Ray Bradbury's own title page?
The ignition point of paper
The ignition point of paper is what the title page claims, 'the temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns', though scientists have since measured paper igniting across a range of temperatures.
Q 15In The Crucible, which farmer signs a confession, then rips it up rather than let it be made public?
John Proctor
John Proctor refuses to let his three sons be stigmatised by a public confession and is led off to hang, while Parris and Hale beg Elizabeth to talk him round and she refuses.
Q 16In Macbeth, who beheads the usurper despite the witches' promise that no man 'of woman born' can harm him?
Macduff
Macduff slips through the witches' wording because he was delivered by Caesarean section, and he re-enters with Macbeth's severed head as Malcolm restores order.
Q 17In Julius Caesar, which conspirator stabs last and is hailed by Antony at the end as 'the noblest Roman of them all'?
Brutus
Brutus, the only plotter Antony believes acted for Rome rather than envy, draws Caesar's 'Et tu, Brute?', a Latin line Shakespeare borrowed from earlier plays rather than inventing it.
Q 18In Beowulf, what is the name of King Hrothgar's great mead hall, the Danish seat of rule that Grendel raids by night?
Heorot
Heorot means 'hart' or stag in Old English, and the poet boasts it was big enough for Hrothgar to present Beowulf with eight horses, each in gold-plated headgear.
Q 19In Jane Eyre, what does Mr Rochester keep hidden upstairs at Thornfield Hall, a secret exposed on his wedding day?
His first wife
His first wife, Bertha Mason, is kept upstairs by the paid keeper Grace Poole, whose drinking occasionally lets her escape, which explains the strange laughter Jane hears.
Q 20In The Great Gatsby, what was Jay Gatsby's name at birth, before the boy from North Dakota reinvented himself?
James Gatz
James Gatz, 'Jimmy' to his family, became Jay Gatsby, a millionaire whose money turns out to come from bootlegging; he first met Daisy as a young officer at Camp Taylor in Louisville.
The Road Not Taken
The Road Not Taken was a private joke on Thomas, who dithered over which route to take on their English walks; Frost once warned an audience, 'it's a tricky poem — very tricky'.
Q 24In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, what does Oedipus do to himself on learning he has killed his father and married his mother?
Gouges out his eyes
He gouges out his eyes with the long gold pins from Jocasta's dress after finding the queen dead; in Homer's older version Oedipus neither blinds himself nor is exiled.
Q 25In The Outsiders, which Robert Frost poem does Ponyboy recite to Johnny at a sunrise while the two hide out?
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nothing Gold Can Stay is recited by Ponyboy after he has cut and dyed his hair as a disguise and read Gone with the Wind aloud to Johnny in their hideout.
Q 26In A Streetcar Named Desire, who leaves with the doctor saying 'I have always depended on the kindness of strangers'?
Blanche DuBois
Blanche DuBois breaks down when the matron grabs her, then goes willingly with the gentler doctor, while the poker game in the next room carries on uninterrupted.
Q 27In Of Mice and Men, what did Lennie do at his last job that sent him and George fleeing a lynch mob?
Grabbed a woman's skirt
He grabbed a woman's skirt because he thought it was pretty, then held on tighter as she panicked, which he always does when stressed; the accusation of rape that followed is why George keeps him close.
Q 28In Lord of the Flies, what do Jack's hunters do to their faces as they take to ritual dances and pig hunts?
Paint them
They paint them, becoming 'barbarians with painted faces', and Jack uses the boys' fear of an imaginary beast to tighten his hold on the tribe.
Q 29Which device, from a Greek compound meaning 'name-making', gives us words like 'buzz' that imitate the sounds they name?
Onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia varies by language: a frog says 'ribbit' in English but 'brekekekex koax koax' in Aristophanes' Greek, and a car horn goes 'tut-tut' in French.
Q 30Which figure of speech, from Greek words for 'beyond' and 'throw', is at work in 'this bag weighs a ton'?
Hyperbole
Hyperbole, 'extravagant exaggeration employed for rhetorical effect', is even a legal category: US courts treat obvious rhetorical hyperbole as protected speech rather than defamation.