Morning Trivia
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59 free Morning trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
A morning trivia set for the start of the day: a classroom warm-up, a team stand-up icebreaker, a breakfast-table game or something to answer over the first coffee. The questions are all about mornings, but the categories are deliberately mixed. There is sunrise and dawn science (why blue light wakes you, what the cortisol awakening response is, how many sunrises the space station sees), breakfast history (corn flakes, muesli, the Egg McMuffin, the pancake race), morning language and religion (a.m., aubades, Fajr, Matins), the goddesses of dawn, and morning television from Dave Garroway to Morning Joe. Difficulty ranges from quick wins about the Morning Star and the meaning of a.m. up to stumpers about Franz Halberg, Amenhotep I's water clock and the first snooze button. Nothing requires specialist knowledge, so it works for a mixed group. Every answer has been checked against a Wikipedia article on the topic, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In German, 'Morgen' means morning, while the same word with a small 'm' means what?
Tomorrow
Tomorrow. English once did much the same: 'morrow' used to mean morning, and 'tomorrow' began as Old English 'to morgenne', literally 'on the morning'.
Q 02The word "dawn" comes from the Old English verb dagian, meaning what?
To become day
To become day. Oddly, 'dawning' is the older word: 'dawn' was probably clipped from it around 1200, and Old English speakers called daybreak 'dagung'.
Q 03The "a.m." on a clock stands for the Latin ante meridiem, which translates as what?
Before midday
Before midday. That is why noon itself is strictly neither a.m. nor p.m.: it cannot come before or after itself, so timekeepers advise writing '12 noon' instead.
Q 04Which meal's name comes from a medieval word that literally meant 'to break one's fast'?
Dinner
Dinner. Medieval dinner was the day's first big meal, eaten between nine and noon; the name stuck as the meal slid later, and the word 'breakfast' is first recorded only in the 15th century.
Q 05Which kind of poem or song is about lovers parting at dawn?
An aubade
An aubade. Troubadours' dawn songs warned a knight to slip away from his lady before he was caught; John Donne's 'The Sun Rising' turns the idea round and scolds the sun instead.
Q 06The military wake-up bugle call "Reveille" takes its name from which language's word for "wake up"?
French
French. It comes from réveillez, the order to "wake up!", and at Anzac Day dawn services the call ends the silence after the Last Post as the flags rise to the masthead.
Q 07The Japanese names for Japan, Nihon and Nippon, literally mean what?
The sun's origin
The sun's origin. The two characters mean "sun" and "origin": seen from China, Japan lies to the east where the sun comes up, hence the nickname Land of the Rising Sun.
Q 08What is a hotel's telephone wake-up service traditionally known as in the United Kingdom?
An alarm call
An alarm call. Before bedside telephones, British shift workers paid a knocker-up a few pence a week to rap on the bedroom window with a long pole.
Q 09The word "circadian" comes from Latin words meaning what?
Around a day
Around a day. Circa means "around" and dies "day", and the "around" is literal: left to itself the human body clock runs about 11 minutes over 24 hours, so light has to keep resetting it.
Q 10In 1729, de Mairan kept which touch-sensitive plant in the dark and saw its leaves still open by day?
Mimosa
Mimosa. His "sensitive plant", probably Mimosa pudica, kept its daily rhythm without sunlight, and a later botanist timed the cycle in darkness at 22 to 23 hours, not 24.
Q 11The 2017 Nobel Prize in medicine honoured the isolation of a gene that sets daily rhythms in which animal?
Fruit flies
Fruit flies. Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young isolated the "period" gene in 1984 and showed that its protein builds up in cells at night and breaks down during the day.
Q 12Which hormone's "awakening response" peaks 30 to 45 minutes after you wake up?
Cortisol
Cortisol. The burst is bigger on workdays than at weekends, which fits the idea that it readies the body for the demands of the day ahead.
Q 13What is the scientific name for the groggy, disoriented state you feel immediately after waking?
Sleep inertia
Q 21Ancient Egyptians watched for which star's first dawn reappearance each year, a sign that the Nile was about to flood?
Sirius
Sirius. After a spell lost in the Sun's glare it returned to the eastern sky just before sunrise, an event astronomers call a heliacal rising, and Egypt's calendar was built around it.
Q 22Murmansk, the largest city north of the Arctic Circle, where the summer Sun stays up for weeks, is in which country?
Russia
Russia. Murmansk was founded only in 1916, on a bay that stays ice-free all year even though it lies north of the Arctic Circle.
Q 23Which Pacific nation bent the International Date Line around itself in the 1990s?
Kiribati
Kiribati. The line used to cut the country in two, leaving its eastern islands a day behind the capital; the change put Kiritimati in UTC+14, where each new date begins.
Sleep inertia. It hits hardest after waking from deep sleep or a nap of more than half an hour, so US safety training tells night-shift nurses to let it clear before any critical task.
Q 14Light of which colour most strongly suppresses the body's production of melatonin?
Blue
Blue. In a Harvard experiment, blue light had about twice the effect of equally bright green light on melatonin and pushed the body clock back twice as far, which is why late-night screens get the blame.
Q 15In sleep psychologist Michael Breus's four chronotypes, which animal stands for people most alert late at night?
Wolf
Wolf. Breus's lions are the early risers and his bears follow the sun, while dolphins, named for an animal that stays alert even while it sleeps, are the light sleepers.
Q 16The temperature at which water vapour condenses into droplets on a cool surface is called what?
Dew point
Dew point. Grass and car roofs radiate their heat away after dark, and once they cool below it the air's moisture beads on them, which is why dew is heaviest after clear, calm nights.
Q 17Which stage of dawn is bright enough for outdoor work without lamps?
Civil dawn
Civil dawn. It starts with the Sun 6 degrees below the horizon, after nautical dawn at 12 and astronomical dawn at 18, and it has legal force: for American pilots, "night" ends when morning civil twilight begins.
Q 18Which architect proposed replacing "sunrise" and "sunset" with the words "sunsight" and "sunclipse"?
Buckminster Fuller
Buckminster Fuller. He argued that "sunrise" and "sunset" keep alive the picture of a Sun circling a still Earth, when it is the turning Earth that brings the Sun into view and hides it again.
Q 19Astronauts aboard the International Space Station see roughly how many sunrises each day?
16
16. The station laps the Earth about every 90 minutes, so the crew runs on Greenwich time and covers the windows at bedtime to fake a night.
Q 20Which planet alternates between being called the "Evening Star" and the "Morning Star"?
Venus
Venus. The ancient Greeks first took its two appearances for different stars, Phosphorus before sunrise and Hesperus after sunset, before working out that both were the same planet.
Q 24The Morning Glory roll cloud can be reliably predicted over the Gulf of Carpentaria in which country?
Australia
Australia. Each spring glider pilots gather in the tiny Queensland town of Burketown to surf the wave of rising air along the cloud's leading edge.
Q 25International Dawn Chorus Day began at Birmingham's Moseley Bog, a childhood haunt of which fantasy author?
Tolkien
Tolkien. He grew up nearby and said the bog inspired the Old Forest of his books; broadcaster Chris Baines later asked friends there for his birthday to hear the wildlife wake, and the idea went worldwide.
Q 26A study in an Ecuadorian forest found that the birds singing earliest in the dawn chorus tend to have what?
Larger eyes
Larger eyes. Bigger eyes probably gather enough of the faint early light for those species to start sooner; birds that feed high in the canopy, where the light arrives first, also sang earlier.
Q 27In Roman mythology, who is the goddess and personification of the dawn?
Aurora
Aurora. In the 17th century astronomers borrowed her name for the northern lights: aurora borealis is Latin for "northern dawn".
Q 28In the best-known telling, Eos won her lover Tithonus immortality but forgot to ask for what?
Eternal youth
Eternal youth. Tithonus could not die but went on ageing until he shrivelled away, and in later tellings he became a chirping insect, a cicada or a grasshopper.
Q 29Who calls the line "prayer is better than sleep" from Sunni mosques at dawn?
The muezzin
The muezzin. In a Sunni tradition the line began with the muezzin Bilal, who called it out on being told the Prophet was still sleeping, and it stayed in the call to Fajr, the first prayer of the day.
Q 30In medieval monasteries, monks gathered to sing Matins at what time?
In the dark before dawn
In the dark before dawn. The standard monastic rule had monks rise at the eighth hour of the night, about two in the morning, for a night office that gave way to Lauds at daybreak.