Honolulu Trivia
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50 free Honolulu trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Honolulu means 'sheltered harbour', and that harbour explains almost everything about the city: why Kamehameha I moved his court here, why Kamehameha III made it the kingdom's capital in 1845, why American warships kept calling, and why the US Navy still runs its Pacific Fleet from next door. This quiz covers the whole arc, from the first Polynesian settlement and Captain William Brown's 1794 arrival to the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani, annexation, the Pearl Harbor attack and statehood. It also gets out of the history books and onto the streets: Iolani Palace and its imprisoned queen, Waikiki's imported sand and the Ala Wai Canal, Diamond Head's misleading name, the Aloha Tower, Duke Kahanamoku's world records and 13 terms as sheriff, the Bishop Museum, TheBus, the Skyline rail line, the Pro Bowl years and Honolulu's odd distinctions as the most remote and most traffic-jammed big city in the United States. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Honolulu and its landmarks, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our Hawaii quiz for the rest of the islands.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Honolulu sits on the southeast coast of which Hawaiian island?
Oahu
Oahu. City and county are a single government covering the whole island, so the mayor of Honolulu is also in charge of the country towns on the far North Shore.
Q 02What does the name Honolulu mean in Hawaiian?
Sheltered harbour
Sheltered harbour, from hono, a port, and lulu, calm. Captain Cook and other early explorers overlooked the anchorage behind its reef, and no foreign ship sailed in until 1794.
Q 03Which trade made Honolulu's port boom in the 1840s?
Whaling
Whaling. Hundreds of whaleships a year put in at Hawaiian ports in the 1840s to rest their crews and restock, and for about 40 years supplying them was the mainstay of the islands' economy.
Q 04Kamehameha III moved the kingdom's capital to Honolulu from which town?
Lahaina
Lahaina. Trade and foreign shipping had been shifting to Honolulu for years, and in 1845 the king moved his government from the Maui town to follow them.
Q 05In 1935, which pilot became the first person to fly solo from Honolulu to the US mainland?
Amelia Earhart
Amelia Earhart. The crossing had a deadly record, with lives lost in a 1927 air race over the same water, yet her own flight to Oakland was mainly routine, with no breakdowns.
Q 06Kamehameha I conquered Honolulu's island in 1795 at which battle, where the defenders were driven over a cliff?
Nuuanu
Nuuanu. The win left only Kauai and Niihau outside his rule, and they joined the kingdom by agreement in 1810 without a battle.
Q 07After the 1893 overthrow, who became Hawaii's president?
Sanford Dole
Sanford Dole. He ran the republic until the United States annexed the islands, then became the territory's first governor, and a younger cousin, James, founded the pineapple company that made the name famous.
Q 08The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that pushed the US into World War II happened on which date?
December 7, 1941
December 7, 1941. The next day President Roosevelt called it 'a date which will live in infamy' before Congress, and he signed the declaration of war on Japan that same afternoon.
Q 09Which is the closest major city to Honolulu?
San Francisco
San Francisco. Even that nearest neighbour is more than 2,300 miles away over open sea, so Honolulu has to import most of its goods and pays well above mainland prices for fuel, power and food.
Q 10Honolulu's antipode is in Botswana, but most of the mainland US lies opposite which ocean?
Indian
The Indian Ocean. Only three scraps of the lower 48, in Colorado and Montana, sit opposite dry land, on remote French islands, so a tunnel from almost any mainland city would come up in open water.
Q 11Fires lit on purpose to fight which disease ran out of control and burned down Honolulu's Chinatown in 1900?
Bubonic plague
Bubonic plague. The Board of Health was burning buildings where victims had lived when the wind shifted and carried embers onto a church steeple, and most of the district went up with it.
Q 12Ala Moana Center is billed as the world's largest what?
Open-air shopping centre
Open-air shopping centre. It stands on a former swamp filled in with spoil from nearby dredging, and when it opened in 1959 it was the largest mall of any kind in the United States.
Q 13The National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific sits inside which Honolulu landform?
Punchbowl Crater
Q 21Which world-championship endurance event was first held in Honolulu?
Ironman triathlon
Ironman triathlon. In 1978 a couple strung three existing island races, a rough-water swim, a round-the-island bike ride and the city marathon, into one day, and said whoever finished would be called the Iron Man.
Q 22Which NFL event was held in Honolulu almost every year from 1980 to 2016?
Pro Bowl
Pro Bowl. The all-star game had changed city every year for seven years, then settled at Aloha Stadium for 30 straight seasons and left only twice before its last Hawaiian game in 2016.
Q 23Honolulu teams won which World Series in 2018 and 2022?
Little League
Punchbowl Crater. Hawaiians knew it as a hill of sacrifice, where breakers of sacred law were put to death, and since 1949 it has held the graves of Americans killed in the Pacific wars.
Q 14Warm enough to be tropical, Honolulu is classed otherwise because it gets too little what?
Rain
Rain. The mountains behind the city catch the trade-wind showers first and leave Honolulu in a rain shadow, so it is classed as hot semi-arid, a label it shares with the edges of deserts.
Q 15Barack Obama, born in Honolulu in 1961, graduated in 1979 from which of the city's private schools?
Punahou School
Punahou School. He came back to Honolulu in 1971 to live with his grandparents and attend it on a scholarship, at a campus that missionaries had founded in 1841.
Q 16Which hurricane devastated Kauai in September 1992 and also damaged Honolulu's island?
Iniki
Iniki. It crossed Kauai on the last day of the Jurassic Park location shoot there, and Steven Spielberg's cast and crew rode it out in their hotel.
Q 17At the 2010 census, which was the largest single Asian ethnic group in Honolulu?
Japanese
Japanese. So many came to work the sugar plantations that by the early 1920s people of Japanese descent made up more than two in five of everyone living in Hawaii.
Q 18Which Honolulu museum holds the world's largest collection of Polynesian cultural artifacts?
Bishop Museum
Bishop Museum. A banker built it in 1889 in memory of his wife, Princess Bernice Pauahi, to house the royal heirlooms that had come down through her family.
Q 19Whose 1973 concert 'Aloha from Hawaii' was beamed live by satellite from a Honolulu arena?
Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley. Because nobody could sell tickets to a television audience, the arena seats went for donations to a cancer fund named after Kui Lee, a Hawaiian songwriter who had died at 34.
Q 20Heiress Doris Duke built which Honolulu estate, now a museum of Islamic art?
Shangri La
Shangri La. Duke began it after a honeymoon that took her through the Islamic world in the 1930s, and for nearly 60 years she filled its rooms with art from Iran, Syria, Morocco and India.
Little League World Series. The 2018 side shut out South Korea 3-0 in the final, and the 2022 team led Curacao 13-3 when the game was stopped after four innings under the run rule.
Q 24Honolulu's main airport is named after which US senator?
Daniel K. Inouye
Daniel K. Inouye. The Honolulu native lost his right arm leading an assault in Italy in 1945, won the Medal of Honor for it, and then sat in Congress for Hawaii from statehood until he died in 2012.
Q 25Honolulu's interstate highways carry which unusual letter prefix?
H
H, for Hawaii. The roads cross no state line, but they earned the Interstate name a year after statehood because they were built for defence, to link the island's scattered military bases.
Q 26In 2012 Honolulu topped a US traffic-congestion ranking, just ahead of which city?
Los Angeles
Los Angeles. Honolulu drivers were wasting 58 hours a year in jams, enough to beat the usual capital of gridlock, and the city has since opened a rail line to take cars off those roads.
Q 27What is the name of Honolulu's rail transit line whose first segment opened in June 2023?
Skyline
Skyline. Voters approved it by a narrow 53% to ease the city's traffic, and its trains run with no drivers on a track raised above the roads it was built to relieve.
Q 28Honolulu's public bus system, twice named America's Best Transit System, is called what?
TheBus
TheBus. The city took the service over in 1971 under Mayor Frank Fasi, after strikes at the private bus company had twice left riders without a single bus for two months.
Q 29Which battleship, on whose deck Japan surrendered in 1945, is now a museum ship at Pearl Harbor?
USS Missouri
USS Missouri. She is moored about 500 yards from the sunken Arizona and faces it, so that the ships on which America's war began and ended lie in the same water.
Q 30The University of Hawaii's main campus is in which Honolulu valley?
Manoa
Manoa. A rainbow came out over the field as the university's footballers upset Oregon State in the last game of their 1923 season, and sportswriters began calling its teams the Rainbows.