Literary Terms
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50 free Literary Terms trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Literary terms are the working vocabulary of English class: the names for what writers do with sound, structure and meaning. Many of them carry a history of their own, borrowed from Greek theatre, Italian song, French printing shops or a single famous novel. This quiz covers the terms that turn up most in high school and AP Literature courses: figures of speech, sound devices, poetic forms and metres, the parts of a plot, character types, points of view and genres. Most questions give a well-known example or the word's origin, so you can reason your way to the answer instead of reciting a definition. It suits students revising for a test, teachers who want a ready multiple-choice set to print, and readers who like knowing the right name for a writer's trick. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which novelist's surname became an adjective for nightmarish predicaments like those in his novel The Trial?
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka gave English the word 'Kafkaesque', though he asked for his unpublished works to be destroyed. His friend Max Brod ignored the request and published them.
Q 02Which Russian playwright advised that a rifle hanging on the wall in the first act must go off by the third?
Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov repeated the advice in several letters to young playwrights. The rule now carries his name: nothing should appear in a story unless it will be used.
Q 03Which fourteen-line poem, mastered by Petrarch and Shakespeare, takes its name from the Italian for 'little song'?
Sonnet
Sonnet comes from the Italian sonetto, and the form reached English through Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, who translated and imitated Petrarch.
Q 04Which word for a perfect society did Thomas More coin from Greek roots that literally mean 'no place'?
Utopia
Utopia was the name More gave an imaginary island in his 1516 book. The word also echoes the Greek for 'good place', a pun More himself pointed out.
Q 05Which Japanese poem of three short phrases in a five-seven-five pattern is tied above all to Matsuo Bashō?
Haiku
Haiku began as hokku, the opening verse of a longer linked poem. The writer Masaoka Shiki gave the form its modern name at the end of the 19th century.
Q 06In George Orwell's Animal Farm, pigs stand for leaders of the Russian Revolution, a famous case of which kind of story?
Allegory
Allegory gives characters a second, hidden meaning: Orwell's boar Napoleon stands for Joseph Stalin, and the exiled Snowball's life parallels that of Leon Trotsky.
Q 07Which five-line comic verse form, rhymed AABBA, did Edward Lear popularise in his Book of Nonsense?
Limerick
Limerick was a name Lear never used for his 212 nonsense verses. The word is generally taken to refer to the Irish city or county, though its origin is debated.
Q 08Which suspense device did Thomas Hardy make literal in a famous scene of his novel A Pair of Blue Eyes?
Cliffhanger
Cliffhanger fits the scene exactly: Hardy left Henry Knight hanging off a cliff. Such endings became a staple of Victorian serial fiction because a hero left in peril sold the next instalment.
Q 09Which term for a story's main character comes from the ancient Greek for the actor who plays the first part?
Protagonist
Protagonist joins the Greek protos, 'first', to agonistes, 'actor' or 'competitor', a word rooted in agon, the Greek for a contest.
Q 10Hamlet's 'To be, or not to be' is a famous example of which speech, named from the Latin for 'speaking alone'?
Soliloquy
Soliloquy lets an audience overhear a character thinking aloud. Saint Augustine used the Latin word around 386 for a book of his own inner debates.
Q 11Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, urging the Irish poor to sell their children as food, is a classic of which genre?
Satire
Satire this savage is called Juvenalian, after the Roman poet Juvenal. Swift's title is now shorthand for any outrageous suggestion made with a straight face.
Q 12Jaques' line 'All the world's a stage' in As You Like It is among literature's most cited examples of which device?
Metaphor
Metaphor says one thing is another, with no 'like' or 'as'. Jaques stretches his across a whole speech, casting men and women as players who act out seven ages.
Q 13The tongue-twister 'Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers' is a textbook example of which sound device in poetry?
Alliteration
Q 21Which device does Emily Dickinson use when Death, a courteous gentleman, kindly stops his carriage for the speaker?
Personification
Personification turns Death into a gentleman caller on a leisurely carriage ride to the grave. The poem first reached print in 1890, after Dickinson had died, under the title 'The Chariot'.
Q 22Which sound device, named from the Greek for 'name-making', does Edgar Allan Poe push to extremes in 'The Bells'?
Onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia so fills the poem that it popularised 'tintinnabulation', a word built on the Latin for 'bell' and often wrongly thought to be Poe's own coinage.
Q 23Which theatrical genre, staged at Athenian festivals of Dionysus, takes its name from Greek words meaning 'goat song'?
Tragedy
Alliteration repeats the opening sound of nearby words. Old English poems such as Beowulf used it, rather than rhyme, as the backbone of every line.
Q 14Which figure of speech, from Greek words meaning 'throw beyond', drives American tall tales about the giant Paul Bunyan?
Hyperbole
Hyperbole is exaggeration that is not meant to be taken literally, and rhetoric has a second name for it: auxesis, which literally means 'growth'.
Q 15Which figure of speech, named from the Greek for 'sharp' and 'dull', covers phrases like 'cruel kindness'?
Oxymoron
Oxymoron is itself a contradiction in terms, and J. R. R. Tolkien liked to read his own surname as a German equivalent meaning 'dull-keen'.
Q 16Which device, known to critics as analepsis, interrupts a story to show earlier events, as the tale of Sinbad does?
Flashback
Flashback is far older than cinema. Another early example is 'The Three Apples', a murder mystery that is also among the tales of the Arabian Nights.
Q 17Which device plants early hints of events to come, and differs from a red herring by pointing readers the right way?
Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing usually appears near the start of a story to build anticipation. It can also make a bizarre later event feel credible, because readers sense they saw it coming.
Q 18When Oedipus vows to hunt down a killer the audience already knows is Oedipus himself, Sophocles is using which device?
Dramatic irony
Dramatic irony hands the audience knowledge that a character lacks, so every curse Oedipus calls down on the murderer falls, unknown to him, on his own head.
Q 19Which term for a character who sets off another by contrast comes from an old jewellers' trick for making gems shine?
Foil
Foil characters work like the bright leaf behind a jewel. Hamlet even puns on the word before his fencing match, telling Laertes, 'I'll be your foil.'
Q 20Which short tale with talking animals and a closing moral is linked above all to Aesop, a legendary Greek slave?
Fable
Fable heroes are usually animals that talk and scheme like people, as in 'The Tortoise and the Hare', 'The Crow and the Pitcher' and 'The Lion and the Mouse'.
Tragedy may owe its name to a goat given as the prize in early choral contests, or to one that was sacrificed after the chorus had danced around it.
Q 24Which term for a group of lines set off within a poem comes from the Italian word for 'room'?
Stanza
Stanza has had homelier English names too, among them batch, fit and stave. A blank line or an indent usually marks where one ends and the next begins.
Q 25Which term for a story's point of highest tension comes from the ancient Greek word for a ladder or staircase?
Climax
Climax first named a figure of speech in which words, phrases or clauses are arranged in order of increasing importance, each one a rung above the last.
Q 26Which term for a comically misused word honours a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's comedy The Rivals?
Malapropism
Malapropism recalls Mrs Malaprop, who praises a man as 'the very pineapple of politeness'. Sheridan built her name on the French mal à propos, 'poorly placed'.
Q 27Which Romantic poet's name describes a proud, moody, brooding kind of hero first seen in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage?
Lord Byron
Lord Byron made the poem partly a self-portrait, and the type soon travelled: Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin echoes the solitary brooding of Childe Harold.
Q 28Which narrative technique, a phrase credited to William James, renders Molly Bloom's thoughts in James Joyce's Ulysses?
Stream of consciousness
Stream of consciousness was first applied to fiction in 1918, when May Sinclair reviewed Dorothy Richardson's novel sequence Pilgrimage. James had used the phrase in 1890 in The Principles of Psychology.
Q 29Which German term covers novels of growing up, from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship to Jane Eyre?
Bildungsroman
Bildungsroman joins the German Bildung, 'formation' or 'education', to Roman, 'novel'. The philologist Karl Morgenstern coined it in his university lectures in 1819.
Q 30Which Latin phrase for a contrived rescue recalls the crane that lowered actors playing gods onto Greek stages?
Deus ex machina
Deus ex machina means 'god from the machine'. More than half of Euripides's surviving plays end with one, and Aristophanes mocked the habit by swinging Euripides himself on stage by crane.