Kissing
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40 free Kissing trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
A kiss looks like the simplest gesture there is, yet it has been studied by scientists, policed by film censors, painted in gold and written into scripture. People have kissed rocks for luck, the ground in thanks and each other in front of news photographers, and a surprising number of those moments became famous. This quiz covers kissing from every angle: what happens in the body and which animals do something similar, where the oldest written records come from, and the customs, superstitions and slang that have grown up around it. It also takes in the kisses people remember from films, television, fairy tales, paintings, sculpture and the pop charts. It is written for anyone who likes a themed trivia round, whether for a Valentine's party, an anniversary game or a few quiet minutes alone. Some questions are gentle, and others reward film buffs, music fans and science readers.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which illness, spread through saliva and common among teenagers, is nicknamed the kissing disease?
Mononucleosis
Mononucleosis is usually caused by the Epstein–Barr virus, which infects most people in childhood, when it produces few or no symptoms.
Q 02Kissing which block of limestone, set in an Irish castle's battlements, is said to grant the gift of the gab?
The Blarney Stone
The Blarney Stone can only be reached by leaning over backwards from the parapet at the top of Blarney Castle, near Cork, with iron rails to grip.
Q 03Which Grimm heroine wakes when a servant stumbles carrying her coffin, not from the kiss Disney later added?
Snow White
Snow White revives when the jolt dislodges a piece of poisoned apple from her throat; Disney's 1937 film swapped the stumble for love's first kiss.
Q 04A 1945 Life magazine photograph of a sailor kissing a stranger on V-J Day was taken in which New York location?
Times Square
Times Square was full of crowds celebrating Japan's surrender, and photographer Eisenstaedt said that had the woman worn dark clothes he would have had no picture.
Q 05Whose Paris tomb gained a glass barrier in 2011 after years of visitors' lipstick kisses damaged the monument?
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde's admirers left so many lipstick prints at Père Lachaise that the grease soaked in, and each cleaning left the surface more porous.
Q 06In which Disney film do two dogs kiss by accident while eating opposite ends of one spaghetti strand?
Lady and the Tramp
Lady and the Tramp kept the scene because the animator assigned to it drew it with such tenderness that Walt Disney was won over.
Q 07When two kissing gouramis, popular aquarium fish, press their lips together, what are they actually doing?
Fighting
Fighting is the point: biologists class the lip-lock as ritualised aggression and call it mouth fighting, a contest in which two rivals press their jaws together for a few seconds.
Q 08Which superhero hangs upside down in a rainy alley for a famous screen kiss with Mary Jane Watson?
Spider-Man
Spider-Man's actor Tobey Maguire found it hard to breathe during the take because the rainwater kept pouring into his nose.
Q 09Which Christmas plant, a parasite that grows on the branches of trees, are couples expected to kiss beneath?
Mistletoe
Mistletoe once came with a limit: in one version of the custom a berry was plucked for every kiss, and the kissing stopped when the berries ran out.
Q 10In the Brothers Grimm's frog tale, the king's daughter breaks the spell not with a kiss but how?
Throwing him at a wall
Throwing him at a wall in a fit of fury is what turns him human in the Grimm text; the kiss seems to have arrived later, in English translations.
Q 11Which disciple used a kiss in the Garden of Gethsemane to point Jesus out to the men sent to arrest him?
Judas Iscariot
Judas Iscariot's kiss identified Jesus to a crowd carrying swords and clubs, and some churches still mark the betrayal on Spy Wednesday of Holy Week.
Q 12The kunik, a greeting made by pressing the nose against a loved one's cheek, belongs to which Arctic people?
Inuit
Inuit press the nose to the cheek; the nose-to-nose rub that English speakers copied from it is an outsiders' version of the gesture.
Q 13Which letter of the alphabet stands for a kiss, not a hug, at the end of a card or text message?
X
X as a written kiss is old enough that a novel of 1878 mentions letters ending in a row of them, though nobody knows how a cross came to mean a kiss.
Q 21Which artist used real gold leaf for The Kiss, a painting of an embracing couple that hangs in Vienna?
Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt painted it in 1907 and 1908, at the height of what is called his Golden Period, adding silver and platinum to the gold.
Q 22Which sculptor's marble lovers in The Kiss were first designed for his bronze portal The Gates of Hell?
Auguste Rodin
Auguste Rodin first titled the piece Francesca da Rimini, after the noblewoman in Dante's Inferno who falls in love with her husband's younger brother Paolo.
Q 23A mural on Berlin's East Side Gallery shows East German leader Erich Honecker kissing which Soviet leader?
Leonid Brezhnev
Q 14Clay tablets from about 2500 BCE, among the earliest records of romantic kissing, come from which region?
Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia's cuneiform texts pushed the record back about a thousand years: the oldest evidence had been thought to be Indian writings from around 1500 BCE.
Q 15Which ancient people had separate words for a kiss on the hand, a kiss between relatives and a kiss of passion?
The Romans
The Romans called a kiss on the hand or cheek an osculum, a closed-lips kiss between relatives a basium and a passionate one a suavium.
Q 16Which pope often knelt to kiss the ground, a gesture begun on reaching a rural parish as a young priest?
John Paul II
John Paul II first knelt that way at the village of Niegowić and repeated it throughout his papacy, having borrowed the gesture from the French saint Jean Vianney.
Q 17Pilgrims circling the Kaaba try to kiss a sacred black rock set into its eastern corner in which city?
Mecca
Mecca's pilgrims are copying a kiss that Islamic tradition says the rock once received from Muhammad; today a silver frame holds its fragments together.
Q 18In British slang, a Glasgow kiss is not a show of affection but which sudden blow, usually aimed at the nose?
A headbutt
A headbutt delivered this way usually leaves a broken nose, and Scottish wrestler Drew McIntyre named one of his ring moves the Glasgow Kiss.
Q 19The kiss and cry, the area where competitors wait with coaches for their scores, got its name in which sport?
Figure skating
Figure skating got the phrase from Finnish official Jane Erkko, who made it up in 1983 when television technicians asked what the area was called.
Q 20Which American chocolate maker has wrapped its bite-sized Kisses in foil with a paper plume since the 1920s?
Hershey's
Hershey's launched Kisses in 1907 and added the paper plume in 1921 as a tiny flag to set them apart from rivals' lookalike chocolates.
Leonid Brezhnev really did kiss Honecker: artist Dmitri Vrubel copied a 1979 photograph taken at East Germany's thirtieth-anniversary celebrations.
Q 24Which hormone, tied to bonding between partners and between mothers and babies, is released during a kiss?
Oxytocin
Oxytocin strengthens the bond with a partner, and a kiss also sets off endorphins and dopamine, which is why it tends to lift the mood.
Q 25Which primates, native to the Congo Basin, are known to kiss one another to restore peace after a quarrel?
Bonobos
Bonobos are also the only animals besides humans that have been seen kissing with their tongues.
Q 26Which muscle encircling the mouth, nicknamed the kissing muscle, does the work of puckering the lips?
Orbicularis oris
Orbicularis oris was once thought to be a single ring but is really four interlaced quadrants, and brass players depend on it as much as kissers do.
Q 27Which name is given to the scientific study of kissing, a field pursued by Charles Darwin among others?
Philematology
Philematology dates from the nineteenth century, and its students have included the criminologist Cesare Lombroso as well as Darwin.
Q 28Kissing bugs, insects named for feeding around people's mouths, spread the parasite behind which illness?
Chagas disease
Chagas disease is passed on not by the bug's saliva but by its droppings, which carry the parasite into the bite wound.
Q 29Nichelle Nichols and William Shatner shared a 1968 kiss, long cited as a US television first, on which series?
Star Trek
Star Trek had telekinetic aliens force Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura together in the episode Plato's Stepchildren, though earlier interracial screen kisses have since come to light.
Q 30Which inventor's studio filmed The Kiss in 1896, an 18-second reel among the first films shown commercially?
Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison's crew had actress May Irwin and her stage partner repeat for the camera the closing kiss of their musical The Widow Jones.