Hobbies Trivia
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100 free Hobbies trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every hobby has a vocabulary its outsiders never hear: birders who chase rarities, stamp and coin enthusiasts with Greek-rooted titles, knitters who grade yarn by the name of a Norfolk village, anglers with a word for the attendant who carries the net. This quiz is built from those words, and from the odd stories of how pastimes began: a GPS treasure hunt born the week a military signal was switched off, a puzzle craze that started with a map glued to a board, a writing challenge with a 50,000-word deadline. The 100 questions cover collectors and their names (philately, numismatics and stranger -ologies), the origins of popular pastimes from letterboxing to speed-solving, and the equipment and jargon of knitting, fishing, model building, gardening and collecting. Every answer comes with a one-line explanation that adds a fact the question left out. Play it to find out which hobbies you know from the inside, share it with the one friend who owns a label maker, or print it for a trivia night round.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which pursuit was dubbed the 'Hobby of Kings' in Renaissance times, when only the very wealthy could afford it?
Coin collecting
Coin collecting has since been promoted from the Hobby of Kings to the 'King of Hobbies', as one of the oldest and most popular pastimes in the world.
Q 02Deltiology, a 1940s coinage from the Greek for a writing tablet, is the collecting of what?
Postcards
Postcards got their collectors' name when Rendell Rhoades, an Ohio collector, took up a hobby magazine's challenge to find something more scholarly than 'postcard collecting'.
Q 03In British birding slang, what is a birder called who travels long distances to tick off a rare bird?
Twitcher
Twitcher comes from the nervous behaviour of Howard Medhurst, a 1950s British birdwatcher; a twitcher who misses the bird has 'dipped out'.
Q 04Which outdoor pastime began on 3 May 2000, the day after the US stopped scrambling civilian satellite signals?
Geocaching
Geocaching's first cache was a black plastic bucket that Dave Ulmer part-buried in Beavercreek, Oregon, holding software, videos, books, money, a can of beans and a slingshot.
Q 05Pteridomania, a Victorian craze that put its motif on gravestones and christening gifts, was a fever for which plants?
Ferns
Ferns were the obsession, and Charles Kingsley coined 'pteridomania' in 1855 while teasing that daughters everywhere had been 'seized' by it.
Q 06An arctophile, whose hobby's name shares its Greek root with the word 'Arctic', collects which toys?
Teddy bears
Teddy bears are the arctophile's prize, and the toy itself is named after President Theodore Roosevelt, who loathed the nickname 'Teddy'.
Q 07What do vexillologists, whose discipline American scholar Whitney Smith named in 1957, study and collect?
Flags
Flags are vexillology's subject, and Smith was still a teenager when he coined the word from the Latin 'vexillum', a square banner carried by Roman cavalry.
Q 08Oology, which a 1954 British Act of Parliament made impossible to practise legally, was the collecting of what?
Birds' eggs
Birds' eggs may be owned in the UK today only if taken before 1954 or under a scientific permit, and selling them is illegal whatever their age.
Q 09What is London cartographer John Spilsbury credited with first selling, around 1760, as an aid for teaching geography?
Jigsaw puzzle
Jigsaw puzzles began as 'dissected maps' for teaching geography; royal governess Lady Charlotte Finch used them on the children of George III.
Q 10Max Park's 3.13-second solve at Pride in Long Beach in 2023 set a then world record for which puzzle?
Rubik's Cube
Rubik's Cube solving began as therapy for Park, who is autistic and as a preteen could not unscrew a bottle cap; his 3.13 seconds beat a record that had stood for nearly five years.
Q 11Which craft kit, devised by artist Dan Robbins for Max Klein's Detroit firm, has its archives at the Smithsonian?
Paint by number
Paint by number boxes promised 'a beautiful oil painting the first time you try', and Robbins said he took the idea from Leonardo da Vinci, who used numbered patterns to teach his apprentices.
Q 12Which construction toy did Liverpool clerk Frank Hornby patent in 1901 under the name 'Mechanics Made Easy'?
Meccano
Meccano parts were at first bought in from outside makers, until demand outran supply and Hornby opened his own factory in Duke Street, Liverpool.
Q 13Which hobby led Terry Herbert to the largest Anglo-Saxon gold hoard ever found, on a Staffordshire farm in July 2009?
Metal detecting
Q 21The first public aquarium, a 'Fish House' stocked by naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, opened in 1853 at which zoo?
London Zoo
London Zoo's Fish House came first, in Regent's Park, and a year later Gosse's manual The Aquarium gave the hobby its modern name and set Victorians keeping sea creatures at home.
Q 22Gongoozlers, a word possibly from Lincolnshire dialect for staring, are people who enjoy watching what?
Canal boats
Canal boats are the gongoozler's spectacle, and the word is said to have begun as boatmen's slang for idlers staring from the towpath, until L. T. C. Rolt's 1944 book Narrow Boat spread it ashore.
Q 23Which term did Robert Stanley of the dealer Stanley Gibbons coin in 1970 to formalise the collecting of paper money?
Notaphily
Metal detecting paid off handsomely: Herbert and farmer Fred Johnson split the £3.285 million that two Midlands museums raised to buy the Staffordshire Hoard.
Q 14Which pastime did Sharon Burns and Tom Porter popularise in 1970s Britain, growing from a few dozen teams to 10,000 weekly?
Pub quiz
Pub quiz nights were Burns and Porter's pitch to landlords from 1976: a cheap way to bring drinkers in on the quiet nights of the week, and an easy sell.
Q 15Which pastime was born in a New York hotel room in 1962, when Oakland businessman Bill Winkenbach drew up its rules?
Fantasy football
Fantasy football took shape while Winkenbach, a part-owner of the Raiders, killed time on a team road trip, and the league he founded, the GOPPPL, was still drafting on its original scoring in 2015.
Q 16Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov was de facto curator of which collection at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology?
Butterflies
Butterflies were Nabokov's science as well as his hobby: his bold idea that Polyommatus blues reached the Americas from Asia in waves across the Bering Strait was borne out by genetic analysis in 2011.
Q 17Which book-sharing movement began in 2009 when Todd Bol built a model one-room schoolhouse in Hudson, Wisconsin?
Little Free Library
Little Free Library boxes passed 150,000 worldwide in 2022, and Bol built the first as a tribute to his mother, a teacher who loved to read.
Q 18Which British hobby took off from 1942 with the first of Ian Allan's 'ABC' booklets for spotters?
Trainspotting
Trainspotting's first ABC began in the Southern Railway's press office, where the young Allan listed its locomotives to save answering enthusiasts' letters; devotees are 'anoraks' in Britain and 'gunzels' in Australia.
Q 19Conchologists, whose hobby grew out of the Renaissance cabinets of curiosities, collect what?
Seashells
Seashells and other mollusc shells are the conchologist's quarry, and the trade in them named an oil giant: Shell traces its name to Marcus Samuel's London shop, which began importing oriental shells in 1833.
Q 20Which Japanese word, slang since the Meiji era, describes buying books and letting them pile up unread?
Tsundoku
Tsundoku is a pun: it slips doku, 'to read', into tsunde oku, 'to leave piled up', so the unread stack is built into the word itself.
Notaphily was a public-relations coinage meant to encourage a market the firm could serve, and banknote collecting only became a field of its own in the 1970s.
Q 24Which collectibles, slipped into packets as stiffeners, did the American firm Allen & Ginter print with actresses and boxers?
Cigarette cards
Cigarette cards began as blank stiffeners, and makers soon printed them in collectable sets for a reason: a smoker chasing the full series kept buying the same brand.
Q 25Letterboxing, where walkers hunt hidden boxes and stamp a logbook, began in 1854 at Cranmere Pool on which moor?
Dartmoor
Dartmoor guide James Perrott left a bottle for visiting cards at Cranmere Pool, and the moor now holds thousands of boxes, many within a short walk of the road.
Q 26Which dissection puzzle reached Western audiences around 1815, carried home on trading ships, and set off a craze across Europe?
Tangram
Tangram sets of seven pieces came west from China, and enjoyed a second craze in Germany from 1891, when industrialist Friedrich Adolf Richter sold stone versions as 'The Anchor Puzzle'.
Q 27Which writing challenge, founded by Chris Baty in 1999 with 21 participants, set a 50,000-word target for November?
NaNoWriMo
NaNoWriMo drafts grew into bestsellers, among them Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants and Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, before the nonprofit behind it announced its closure in 2025, citing financial problems.
Q 28Fourteen enthusiasts were charged with espionage at a Greek air base open day in 2001 while pursuing which hobby?
Plane spotting
Plane spotting at Kalamata looked like spying to Greek police; the twelve Britons and two Dutch faced up to 20 years in prison but were all acquitted on appeal a year later.
Q 29Which British firm made a promotional Ferguson tractor in 1949 and chose a Spitfire as its first aircraft kit?
Airfix
Airfix chose its name so it would come first alphabetically in trade directories; founder Nicholas Kove had started out in 1939 making air-filled rubber toys, then plastic combs.
Q 30Which model-railway scale, 1:87, is the world's most popular, though Britain prefers the slightly larger OO?
HO gauge
HO gauge means 'half O', being half the size of the older O scale, and it runs on the same 16.5 mm track that British OO uses.