Nerd Trivia
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100 free Nerd trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
45 free nerd trivia questions with answers. This is the quiz for people who know that a parsec is a distance, that the answer is 42, and that the word 'nerd' was invented by Dr. Seuss. Forty-five questions range across the whole nerd canon: Star Wars and Star Trek, Tolkien's languages and Doctor Who's police box, Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, Zelda, Pokémon, Portal, Tetris and the Konami Code, Marvel and DC's first appearances, and the science and computing lore behind it all, from Grace Hopper's moth and Turing's machine to Voyager's golden record and Schrödinger's cat. No single franchise gets more than a handful of questions, so a Trekkie cannot coast and a Tolkien scholar cannot either. Difficulty runs from medium to genuinely hard, because a nerd quiz that anyone could ace would be missing the point. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the works, people and concepts involved, and each question carries its source. No fan-wiki hearsay.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which computer calculates the Ultimate Answer as 42?
Deep Thought
Deep Thought, built by hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings, spends seven and a half million years computing 42, then admits nobody knows the Question and designs a greater computer, the Earth, to find it.
Q 02Which children's author gave the world its first recorded use of the word 'nerd', in 1950?
Dr. Seuss
Dr. Seuss coined it in If I Ran the Zoo (1950), whose narrator wants to collect 'a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too'; Newsweek reported the slang sense in 1951.
Q 03Ernő Rubik, inventor of the Rubik's Cube, was a professor of what?
Architecture
Architecture: Ernő Rubik was teaching at Budapest's College of Applied Arts when he built his Magic Cube in 1974 and applied for a Hungarian patent in 1975.
Q 04The first literal computer 'bug', a moth found in 1947, is linked to which pioneer?
Grace Hopper
Grace Hopper's team taped the moth from the Harvard Mark II into the logbook in 1947; she later wrote the A-0 compiler, helped create COBOL and retired a rear admiral.
Q 05Linus Torvalds first released the Linux kernel in which year?
1991
Torvalds announced the kernel on the comp.os.minix newsgroup in August 1991 and posted version 0.01 that September, written for Intel 386 PCs.
Q 06Alan Turing did his wartime codebreaking at which British site?
Bletchley Park
Turing joined the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park in September 1939 and led Hut 8, the section that broke German naval Enigma.
Q 07Who first used the Greek letter π for the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, in 1706?
William Jones
William Jones, a Welsh mathematician, introduced π for the ratio in his 1706 Synopsis Palmariorum Matheseos; Euler adopted the symbol in the 1730s and made it standard.
Q 08Fibonacci introduced his famous sequence to Western mathematics in a 1202 book using which example?
Breeding rabbits
Breeding rabbits: Liber Abaci (1202) asks how many pairs one pair produces in a year if each mature pair bears a new pair monthly, giving 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8.
Q 09Which rock-and-roll pioneer is on the Voyager Golden Record alongside Bach and Beethoven?
Chuck Berry
Chuck Berry's 'Johnny B. Goode' is the only rock-and-roll track among the 27 pieces of music on the Golden Record, selected by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan.
Q 10How long after its twin, Voyager 2, did Voyager 1 launch?
About two weeks later
About two weeks later: Voyager 2 lifted off on 20 August and Voyager 1 on 5 September, but a faster trajectory carried Voyager 1 past Jupiter and Saturn first.
Q 11Schrödinger's cat was proposed in 1935 as a response to a paper by which three physicists?
Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen
Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen published their paradox in May 1935; Schrödinger's reply that year put a cat in a box with poison triggered by one radioactive decay, to show superposition turning absurd at everyday scale.
Q 12xkcd's tagline describes it as 'a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and' what?
Language
Language completes the tagline. Randall Munroe started xkcd in 2005 by scanning doodles from his old school notebooks, and he says the name is simply a word with no phonetic pronunciation, not an acronym.
Q 13In which year was San Diego Comic-Con founded?
1970
Q 21Which company developed the 2007 puzzle game Portal, home of the AI GLaDOS?
Valve
Valve shipped Portal inside The Orange Box in 2007; Ellen McLain voices GLaDOS, who closes the game with Jonathan Coulton's song 'Still Alive'.
Q 22In The Legend of Zelda, what is the name of the land Link and Zelda fight to save?
Hyrule
Hyrule is the kingdom of most Zelda games; the 1986 original sends Link across it to gather the eight fragments of the Triforce of Wisdom and rescue Zelda from Ganon.
Q 23How many Pokémon species were in the original pair of Game Boy games released in 1996?
151
151, from Bulbasaur to Mew: Satoshi Tajiri's Game Freak released Pokémon Red and Green in Japan on 27 February 1996, with Mew hidden in the code as a secret 151st.
1970: Shel Dorf and a group of San Diego fans staged the first Golden State Comic-Con that August at the U.S. Grant Hotel, drawing about 300 attendees.
Q 14Dungeons & Dragons was created by Gary Gygax and which co-designer?
Dave Arneson
Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign supplied the dungeon-crawl ideas that Gygax turned into rules; Tactical Studies Rules published the first boxed set in 1974.
Q 15Which linguist wrote The Klingon Dictionary in 1985 and made Klingon sound deliberately alien?
Marc Okrand
Marc Okrand built Klingon for Star Trek III (1984) from the sounds James Doohan had improvised for the first film, then codified it in The Klingon Dictionary.
Q 16Tolkien's Elvish tongue Quenya took its main inspiration from the sound of what?
Finnish
Finnish: Tolkien said discovering the Kalevala's tongue as a student shaped Quenya's sound and grammar, while its cousin Sindarin was modelled on Welsh.
Q 17From 1925 to 1945 Tolkien held a professorship of what at Oxford?
Anglo-Saxon
Anglo-Saxon: Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College from 1925, publishing The Hobbit in 1937, before moving to the Merton chair of English in 1945.
Q 18Doctor Who first aired on the BBC in which year?
1963
1963: the first episode, An Unearthly Child, went out on 23 November 1963, the day after President Kennedy's assassination, with William Hartnell as the Doctor.
Q 19What does TARDIS stand for?
Time And Relative Dimension In Space
Time And Relative Dimension In Space is how Susan explains the name in the first episode, An Unearthly Child; the plural 'Dimensions' crept in later and both forms have been used on screen.
Q 20Frank Herbert's Dune is set on which desert planet?
Arrakis
The book tied for the first Nebula Award for Best Novel and Herbert has said his mushroom-growing hobby fed the idea of the spice.
Q 24Shigeru Miyamoto created Donkey Kong, and Mario, after Nintendo failed to license which comic-strip character?
Popeye
Popeye: Nintendo could not secure the rights, so Miyamoto swapped Popeye, Bluto and Olive Oyl for a carpenter, an ape and a damsel, reusing unsold Radar Scope cabinets in 1981.
Q 25In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, what does Arthur's squire Patsy bang together to mimic hoofbeats?
Coconut shells
Coconut shells: the film could not afford horses, so Patsy clops two halves together, prompting the castle guards' debate over whether a swallow could carry a coconut.
Q 26Superman first appeared in issue #1 of which comic, published in April 1938?
Action Comics
Action Comics #1, cover-dated June 1938 and on sale that April, introduced Superman by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, who had sold the character to DC for $130.
Q 27Which writer, uncredited for decades, was recognised in 2015 as Batman's co-creator?
Bill Finger
Bill Finger wrote Batman's first story and proposed the cowl, cape and the name Bruce Wayne after Bob Kane's early sketch; DC formally credited him in 2015.
Q 28Gene Roddenberry pitched the original Star Trek as what 'to the stars'?
Wagon Train
Wagon Train: Roddenberry's 1964 pitch sold the series as 'Wagon Train to the stars', a frontier drama whose ship was first named the S.S. Yorktown; NBC ran it from 1966 to 1969.
Q 29Leonard Nimoy based the Vulcan salute on a gesture from what?
A Jewish priestly blessing
A Jewish priestly blessing: Nimoy recalled seeing the kohanim form the Hebrew letter shin with their hands in an Orthodox synagogue as a boy, and reused it in 1967's 'Amok Time'.
Q 30The no-win Kobayashi Maru test was invented for which Star Trek film?
The Wrath of Khan
The Wrath of Khan (1982) opens with Saavik failing the Kobayashi Maru; Kirk later admits he passed only by reprogramming the simulator, earning a commendation for original thinking.