Leprechauns
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40 free Leprechauns trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The leprechaun is Ireland's most exported fairy, and almost everything people think they know about him is newer than the legend. The little man of the old stories dressed differently, kept different company and had better things to do than sit beside a pot of gold. He turns up in a saga more than a thousand years old, in Victorian folklore collections, and in a long argument among scholars about where his name comes from. This quiz covers both leprechauns: the one in Irish folklore and the one on the cereal box. Expect questions on his trade, his clothes, his relatives among the fairies and the rules for catching him, then on the films, sports mascots, novels, roadside attractions and economic jokes that have borrowed him since. It works for a St. Patrick's Day party, a classroom in March, a pub quiz round or anyone who wants to know what the stories said before the greeting cards took over. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
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Q 01Before the 20th century, Irish tradition generally dressed the leprechaun in a coat of which colour?
Red
Red was the leprechaun's colour in older accounts. An 1831 description by Samuel Lover gives him a square-cut coat richly laced with gold.
Q 02Which future sitcom star had her first major film role in the 1993 horror comedy Leprechaun?
Jennifer Aniston
Jennifer Aniston played a teenager spending the summer at her father's farmhouse, a year before Friends made her famous.
Q 03Which General Mills cereal, the first to include marshmallows, has a cartoon leprechaun as its mascot?
Lucky Charms
Lucky Charms began when a developer mixed Cheerios with bits of circus peanuts. Its mascot was originally called L.C. Leprechaun.
Q 04In Irish folklore, what must a captor never do after seizing a leprechaun, or the creature will escape?
Look away from him
Look away from him for an instant and he is gone. In one classic tale the captor keeps his eyes fixed on his captive across hedges, ditches and bog.
Q 05Which US university made a leprechaun its official mascot in 1965, replacing a succession of Irish terrier dogs?
Notre Dame
Notre Dame had been represented by terriers usually named Clashmore Mike. The fists-up leprechaun logo was drawn in 1964 for a fee of $50.
Q 06Which treat do American parents typically leave in a child's leprechaun trap to show the creature escaped overnight?
Chocolate coins
Chocolate coins stand in for the leprechaun's treasure. The St. Patrick's Day craft is largely unknown in Ireland itself.
Q 07Which future James Bond had an early starring role in the leprechaun film Darby O'Gill and the Little People?
Sean Connery
Sean Connery was borrowed from 20th Century Fox, where he was under contract, and Variety's reviewer thought him the film's weakest link.
Q 08In Irish folklore, which trade is the leprechaun's main occupation, one said to have made him very rich?
Shoemaker
Shoemaker is the leprechaun's calling, and he is usually seen at work on a single shoe rather than a pair.
Q 09In the Harry Potter books, what becomes of the gold that leprechaun mascots produce at the Quidditch World Cup?
It vanishes within hours
It vanishes within hours, a trick from creatures that are officially classed as beasts even though they can speak.
Q 10In the earliest known leprechaun tale, what do the captured sprites grant King Fergus mac Léti in return for release?
Three wishes
Three wishes bought the sprites their freedom after they tried to carry off the sleeping king. The saga has been dated to the eighth century.
Q 11Which NBA team's leprechaun logo was designed by Zang Auerbach, the brother of its head coach?
Boston Celtics
Boston Celtics branding nods to the city's large Irish population, and the logo stayed green, white and black until 1996.
Q 12Which actor, also Wicket the Ewok in Return of the Jedi, played the murderous title role in 1993's Leprechaun?
Warwick Davis
Warwick Davis pushed for more comedy in a part first written as straight horror, and performed most of his own stunts.
Q 13Which producer studied Gaelic folklore in Ireland before making the leprechaun film Darby O'Gill and the Little People?
Walt Disney
Q 21In the 1993 horror film Leprechaun, which plant suppresses the villain's powers and is finally used to destroy him?
A four-leaf clover
A four-leaf clover first pins him inside a crate. At the climax another is stuck to chewing gum and fired into his mouth.
Q 22Which Nobel-winning economist invented the phrase 'leprechaun economics' in a 2016 tweet about Irish GDP figures?
Paul Krugman
Paul Krugman was mocking a reported 26.3 percent jump in Ireland's output for 2015, a figure later revised only slightly, to 24.6 percent.
Q 23Irish folklore divides fairies into trooping fairies and which other class, the one that includes the leprechaun?
Solitary
Walt Disney began planning the film in the 1940s, and more than a decade passed before it reached cinemas in 1959.
Q 14Which Irish city has been home since 2010 to the National Leprechaun Museum, which claims to be the world's first?
Dublin
Dublin's museum on Jervis Street includes a room of oversized furniture that makes visitors feel they have shrunk.
Q 15Where does the fourth Leprechaun horror film send its villain, who stalks a platoon of marines to reclaim a princess?
Outer space
Outer space is the setting of Leprechaun 4, which opens in 2096 with the creature courting an alien princess to become king of her planet.
Q 16Which Irish fairy, said by some to be a leprechaun on a drinking spree, haunts wine cellars and breweries?
Clurichaun
The clurichaun can slip through keyholes to raid a cellar, and one tale has him turning bog rushes into horses to ride.
Q 17In which fantasy book series by Eoin Colfer does Captain Holly Short serve in a fairy police unit called LEPrecon?
Artemis Fowl
Artemis Fowl's LEPrecon is short for Lower Elements Police Reconnaissance, and the series opens with its captain kidnapped for a ton of gold.
Q 18Which Irish wooden club, also used as a walking stick, is carried by leprechaun mascots in American sport?
Shillelagh
A shillelagh is typically cut from stout, knotty blackthorn, with a large knob at the top.
Q 19Leprechaun economics, the freak 2015 jump in Irish GDP, was later traced to which US tech giant's tax restructuring?
Apple
Apple was confirmed as the cause only in 2018, because Irish law obliged the statistics office to protect the company's identity.
Q 20Which US city is home to Mill Ends Park, long billed as the only leprechaun colony west of Ireland?
Portland, Oregon
Portland, Oregon owes the park to columnist Dick Fagan, who planted flowers in a hole meant for a light pole and claimed a leprechaun lived there.
Solitary fairies such as the leprechaun are met alone rather than in groups, and their pranks were thought milder than the child-stealing of the fairy mounds.
Q 24Which future Nobel laureate edited Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, with its chapter on the leprechaun?
W. B. Yeats
W. B. Yeats pictured the leprechaun there as a withered old practical joker grown rich on buried treasure crocks.
Q 25The Old Irish word luchorpán, ancestor of the word leprechaun, is traditionally explained as meaning what?
Small body
Small body is the long-standing reading, from lu, meaning little, and corpan, a diminutive of corp, a word borrowed from Latin corpus.
Q 26Which city does the villain rampage through in Leprechaun 3, the first film of the horror series to skip cinemas?
Las Vegas
Las Vegas is where the creature, turned to a statue by a magic medallion, is sold to a pawn shop and freed when the owner removes it.
Q 27In the TV movie The Luck of the Irish, teenager Kyle Johnson learns he is half leprechaun while starring in which sport?
Basketball
Basketball is Kyle's game, and his fortunes turn when a family heirloom is stolen and he begins to shrink and grow pointed ears.
Q 28A 2006 TV news report of a leprechaun in a tree, an early viral YouTube hit, came from which Alabama city?
Mobile
Mobile's Crichton neighbourhood drew crowds to the tree, and a resident's crude sketch of the creature helped make it a local icon.
Q 29Whose Habitats Directive was invoked in 2009 to protect the leprechauns said to live on Ireland's Slieve Foye?
The European Union
The European Union directive normally shields plants and wildlife. In Carlingford a sign warns that hunters and fortune seekers will be prosecuted.
Q 30Which 1968 Francis Ford Coppola musical has Fred Astaire steal a crock of gold from a leprechaun named Og?
Finian's Rainbow
Finian's Rainbow follows the thief to the American South, where he plans to bury the crock near Fort Knox in the belief that it will multiply.