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50 free Idioms trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Every idiom is a tiny fossil. 'Three sheets to the wind' only makes sense if you know what a sheet does on a sailing ship, 'mad as a hatter' is a chapter of occupational medicine, and 'saved by the bell' has nothing to do with being buried alive, whatever your uncle says. These 50 questions cover the meanings and origins of the English idioms people actually use: the ones Shakespeare coined, the ones sailors and soldiers brought home, the ones lifted from Aesop and the King James Bible, idioms about animals, body parts, food and money, and a handful of fill-in-the-missing-word puzzles. Several exist to bust a popular myth, because folk etymologies are half the fun. It suits a pub quiz, an English lesson, or anyone who has ever wondered why a herring would be red. Play it on your phone with instant answers and explanations, or print it for the table.
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Q 01'Saved by the bell' comes from which sport, rather than the coffin bell-pulls people often credit?
Boxing
Boxing spares a floored fighter when the bell ends the round before the referee counts him out; the tale of bells fitted to coffins for the buried-alive is a folk etymology.
Q 02Which measuring idiom is falsely said to come from a law letting husbands beat wives with a thin stick?
Rule of thumb
Rule of thumb has no such law behind it: the phrase first appears in a 1685 sermon, and a thumb's breadth simply served as a rough inch in the cloth trade.
Q 03'Pandora's box' is a mistranslation: in Hesiod's Greek, what kind of container did Pandora actually open?
A jar
A jar, a big storage pithos, is what Hesiod wrote; the 16th-century scholar Erasmus rendered it as the Latin pyxis, a box, and the error stuck.
Q 04Which metal, used to turn fur into felt, poisoned 19th-century hat-makers and gave us 'mad as a hatter'?
Mercury
Mercury compounds in felt-making caused erethism, with tremors, slurred speech and hallucinations so common in Danbury, Connecticut that locals called it the Danbury Shakes.
Q 05'Humble pie' began as 'umble pie', a dish servants made from which ingredient while the lord ate venison?
Deer offal
Deer offal, the heart, liver and lungs once called umbles, filled the pie; 'humble' crept in by folk etymology, and by the 1800s the phrase meant a humiliating climbdown.
Q 06Which food completes 'spill the ___', the secret-revealing idiom first attested in 20th-century American English?
Beans
Beans, not tea: 'spill the beans' surfaces in American English in the early 1900s, and the story that it began with ancient Greeks voting with coloured beans is likely folk etymology.
Q 07Which idiom was born when playwright John Dennis heard his 1709 storm sound effect used in a rival's Macbeth?
Steal my thunder
Steal my thunder is what Dennis bellowed: his Appius and Virginia had flopped at Drury Lane, but the theatre kept his thunder-sheet effect for its next production.
Q 08Under Britain's Riot Act, the 1715 law behind 'read the riot act', how many people made an unlawful assembly?
12
12 or more people, once a magistrate had read the proclamation aloud, had one hour to disperse; anyone who stayed was guilty of a felony punishable by death.
Q 09'Bury the hatchet' comes from a peace rite of which people, whose chiefs literally buried weapons to end a war?
The Iroquois
The Iroquois, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, sealed peace by burying weapons; Jesuit missionaries described the rite in 1644, and a Boston diarist saw 'two Axes' put in the ground at a 1680 treaty.
Q 10'Wild-goose chase' shows up in which Shakespeare play, when the phrase still named a follow-the-leader riding sport?
Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet gives Mercutio the line 'if our wits run the wild-goose chase'; in the 1590s sport, riders had to copy every erratic turn of the lead rider, like geese in flight.
Q 11Iago's 'green-eyed monster' warning about jealousy comes from which Shakespeare tragedy about a Moorish general?
Othello
Othello hears Iago purr 'O beware, my lord, of jealousy! It is the green-eyed monster, which doth mock the meat it feeds on', and on that poison strangles the innocent Desdemona.
Q 12Shakespeare used 'break the ice' in which comedy about the wooing of the fiercer of two Paduan sisters?
The Taming of the Shrew
The Taming of the Shrew has Tranio tell Petruchio 'if you break the ice and do this feat', meaning tame the shrew Katherina, so that her sister Bianca is free to marry.
Q 13'In a pickle' is said by a drunk jester shipwrecked on an enchanted island in which Shakespeare play?
Q 21'Groggy' comes from Admiral Edward Vernon, 'Old Grog', who in 1740 had sailors' ration of which spirit watered down?
Rum
Rum, half a pint a day, was cut with a quart of water on Vernon's order of 21 August 1740; the nickname came from his grogram cloak, and 'grog' soon meant the drink and 'groggy' its effects.
Q 22'I like the cut of your jib', sailors' praise for someone's look, refers to which part of a sailing ship?
A triangular foresail
A triangular foresail, set ahead of the foremast, was cut differently from nation to nation, so 18th-century sailors could tell friend from foe by a distant ship's jib.
Q 23'Slush fund' began at sea as cash a crew raised by selling what to tallow makers?
Cooking fat
The Tempest
The Tempest's Trinculo says 'I have been in such a pickle since I saw you last' after a night in the wine; the phrase had already existed in Dutch.
Q 14Shylock's bond with Antonio in which Shakespeare play gave us 'a pound of flesh' for a ruthlessly exacted debt?
The Merchant of Venice
The Merchant of Venice has Shylock lend 3,000 ducats against a pound of Antonio's flesh; when the loan defaults he demands it, and Portia's 'not one drop of blood' ruling saves Antonio.
Q 15Casca's 'it was Greek to me', on a speech by Cicero, comes from which Shakespeare play about a Roman assassination?
Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar has Casca admit that Cicero's Greek went over his head, a literal joke Shakespeare turned into the standard line for anything unintelligible.
Q 16'Salad days', for one's green and youthful time, was coined in which Shakespeare play, spoken by an Egyptian queen?
Antony and Cleopatra
Antony and Cleopatra ends its first act with Cleopatra dismissing 'my salad days, when I was green in judgment, cold in blood', her reckless youth before Antony.
Q 17'Hoist with his own petard', blown up by your own bomb, comes from which Shakespeare play about a Danish prince?
Hamlet
Hamlet plots to turn the trap on the schoolfellows escorting him to England; a petard was a small bomb for blowing in doors, so its engineer is 'hoist' into the air by his own blast.
Q 18Which poet's 1798 Rime of the Ancient Mariner gave us 'an albatross around your neck' for a burden of guilt?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's mariner shoots the albatross that had followed his ship as a good omen, and the thirst-silenced crew hang the dead bird around his neck as the mark of his guilt.
Q 19Which Scottish novelist's 1816 book The Antiquary gave print its first 'cold shoulder', lifted from Scots dialect?
Walter Scott
Walter Scott wrote of 'shewing o' the cauld shouther', and the tale that the phrase refers to serving unwelcome guests a cold joint of mutton is a later invention.
Q 20In 'three sheets to the wind', the sailors' phrase for being drunk, what exactly is a 'sheet'?
A rope controlling a sail
A rope controlling a sail is a sheet, so with three loose the canvas flaps and the ship lurches like a drunk; sailors graded it, one sheet for tipsy, three for falling over.
Cooking fat, or 'slush', skimmed from the galley pots was sold ashore, and the money was kept apart from the ship's accounts to buy small comforts for the crew.
Q 24Which idiom for a showy start that fizzles comes from flintlocks whose priming powder lit without firing the shot?
Flash in the pan
Flash in the pan described a musket whose pan of priming powder flared but failed to ignite the main charge, a burst of light and no shot; by the late 1600s it meant any fizzled sensation.
Q 25'Run the gauntlet' comes from 'gatlopp', a soldiers' punishment run between two rows of men, in which language?
Swedish
Swedish gatlopp, 'lane' plus 'course', named the ordeal of running between two lines of soldiers who struck the victim; English spelling later merged it with the unrelated armoured gauntlet.
Q 26'Riding shotgun', now the front passenger seat, first described an armed guard beside the driver of what?
A stagecoach
A stagecoach carrying gold or mail had a 'shotgun messenger' up beside the driver to see off bandits, though the phrase itself isn't recorded until a 1905 Western novel.
Q 27Which idiom for enduring pain is often traced to patients clenching ammunition in their teeth during surgery?
Bite the bullet
Bite the bullet may come from surgery without anaesthetic, though evidence is thin; 'chew a bullet' is recorded from 1796, and British troops in 1857 spoke of 'biting the cartridge'.
Q 28'Hat trick' began in 1858 in which sport, when fans bought H. H. Stephenson a hat for three in a row?
Cricket
Cricket's H. H. Stephenson took three wickets with three consecutive deliveries, and the spectators' collection bought him a hat; football borrowed the term for three goals.
Q 29William Cobbett's 1807 tale behind 'red herring' had a boy drag a kipper to pull which animals off a hare's trail?
Hounds
Hounds, harriers in Cobbett's telling, would abandon the hare's scent for a smoked herring dragged on a string; he retold the story so often that the figurative sense took hold.
Q 30In 'buy a pig in a poke', the idiom for purchasing something unseen, what is a 'poke'?
A sack
A sack, from the French poque that also gave us 'pocket' and 'pouch', hid the goods; John Heywood was already warning against buying 'the pig in the poke' in 1555.