Nineteen Eighty-Four Trivia
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100 free Nineteen Eighty-Four trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Nineteen Eighty-Four trivia quiz covers George Orwell's 1984 from the first diary entry to the Chestnut Tree Café. The story questions take in Airstrip One and Oceania, the Ministry of Truth and its three slogans, telescreens and memory holes, the Two Minutes Hate, the antiques shop, the Junior Anti-Sex League, the forbidden book, the switch from Eurasia to Eastasia, and the rats behind the door of Room 101. Then it turns to how the book came to be: the Tehran Conference that gave Orwell the idea, the Russian novel that showed him the form, the working title he dropped, the tuberculosis he wrote through, the manuscript his widow sold for £50, and the Soviet slogan behind '2 + 2 = 5'. The last stretch follows the book into the world, from Peter Cushing and John Hurt to David Bowie, Radiohead, Apple's Super Bowl commercial and the sales spike of 2017. For Orwell's life beyond this one novel, BrainPickle has a separate George Orwell quiz. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on the novel, Newspeak, Big Brother and the ministries, and each explanation adds one detail worth remembering.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which satire preceded Nineteen Eighty-Four?
Animal Farm
Animal Farm was turned down by several publishers, T. S. Eliot among them, before it appeared in 1945. Its success made Orwell's name, and the dystopia he wrote as a follow-up was his last book.
Q 02What is the name of Nineteen Eighty-Four's protagonist?
Winston Smith
Winston Smith begins his revolt by opening a diary. Nothing is illegal, since there are no longer any laws, yet he expects death or 25 years in a labour camp if he is caught.
Q 03What has Great Britain been renamed in Nineteen Eighty-Four?
Airstrip One
Airstrip One is no longer a country at all, only the third most populous province of a superstate. The hero recalls it was once England or Britain, though he feels fairly certain London was always London.
Q 04Which superstate is home to Nineteen Eighty-Four's protagonist?
Oceania
Oceania takes in the Americas, the British Isles, Australasia and southern Africa. It is always at war with one of its two rivals, and whenever the enemy changes, the records are rewritten to match.
Q 05What is the Party's ruling ideology called in Nineteen Eighty-Four?
Ingsoc
Ingsoc is short for 'English Socialism'. Orwell wrote as a democratic socialist himself, and meant the Party's creed as a perversion of the ideals he held.
Q 06Where does Nineteen Eighty-Four's protagonist work?
The Ministry of Truth
The Ministry of Truth is where he falsifies old newspapers for a living. Its sister ministries are named the same way: the one called Peace wages war, and the one called Love runs the torture cells.
Q 07Which group makes up 85 per cent of the population in Nineteen Eighty-Four?
The proles
The proles are left almost unwatched, because the Party thinks them too dull to rebel. The hero disagrees: he writes in his diary that if there is hope, it lies with them.
Q 08In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party's slogans run: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is what?
Strength
Strength completes the set, and the slogans are meant in earnest: a forbidden book explains that a war which never ends keeps the rulers as secure as a lasting peace would.
Q 09In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what are the two-way devices that watch Party members at home called?
Telescreens
Telescreens can be turned down but never off in an ordinary home. The hero is stunned when a senior official casually switches his own off: only the Inner Party has that privilege.
Q 10In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what are the ducts where unwanted documents are dropped for burning called?
Memory holes
Memory holes whirl paper away to hidden furnaces. The name outlived the novel: to send an awkward fact 'down the memory hole' now means to make it quietly disappear.
Q 11In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what is someone called once the Party has erased them from every record?
An unperson
An unperson has, officially, never existed. Life later copied it: after secret-police chief Beria was shot, owners of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia were told to cut out his entry and paste in pages on the Bering Sea.
Q 12Which shopkeeper sells Nineteen Eighty-Four's protagonist his diary and later rents him a room?
Mr Charrington
Mr Charrington, the kindly old antiques dealer, turns out to be an officer of the Thought Police. A device hidden behind a picture in the rented room had been listening all along.
Q 13In Nineteen Eighty-Four, which young woman begins a secret affair with the protagonist?
Julia
Q 21In Nineteen Eighty-Four, a cut in which ration is announced a day later as a rise?
Chocolate
Chocolate drops from thirty grammes a week to twenty. A day later crowds are thanking their leader for raising it to twenty, and the hero seems to be the only one who remembers.
Q 22What is the Party's artificial, shrinking language called in Nineteen Eighty-Four?
Newspeak
Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year. The aim is to make heresy impossible, because there will be no words left in which to think it.
Q 23Which colleague of Nineteen Eighty-Four's protagonist is compiling a new edition of the Party's dictionary?
Syme
Syme adores the job and calls the destruction of words a beautiful thing. The hero predicts that a man who sees so clearly will not last, and one morning he is simply missing from work.
Julia makes the first move, slipping him a note at work that reads 'I love you'. Until then he had taken her for a spy, and had even pictured smashing her skull with a cobblestone.
Q 14In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the hero's lover wears the scarlet sash of which fanatical organisation?
The Junior Anti-Sex League
The Junior Anti-Sex League is her cover. She gives it three evenings a week while breaking every rule it stands for, on the principle that yelling with the crowd is the only way to be safe.
Q 15Which Nineteen Eighty-Four coinage names the trick of believing two contradictory things at once?
Doublethink
Doublethink lets a Party member tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing them. The word outlived the book: 'doublespeak', which appears nowhere in the novel, was coined on its model in the 1950s.
Q 16Which Inner Party official pretends to recruit Nineteen Eighty-Four's protagonist into the resistance?
O'Brien
O'Brien is really a loyal agent of the Thought Police, and he becomes the hero's torturer. He tells his prisoner flatly that the Party seeks power entirely for its own sake.
Q 17What is the supposed underground resistance movement in Nineteen Eighty-Four called?
The Brotherhood
The Brotherhood may be nothing but bait. The hero's interrogator says he will never learn whether it exists, and adds that he helped to write its secret handbook himself.
Q 18Who is the Party's official enemy of the people in Nineteen Eighty-Four?
Emmanuel Goldstein
Emmanuel Goldstein echoes Trotsky, goatee beard included. Nobody is sure he even exists, yet not a day passes without fresh conspirators acting on his orders being unmasked.
Q 19What is the title of the forbidden book in Nineteen Eighty-Four?
The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism
The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism is whispered of simply as 'the book'. The hero reads how the Party holds power, but is arrested before he reaches the chapter on why.
Q 20What is Nineteen Eighty-Four's daily ritual of screaming at a film of the state's enemy called?
The Two Minutes Hate
The Two Minutes Hate needs no acting. The hero finds it impossible not to join in: within thirty seconds he is shouting with the rest and kicking the rung of his chair.
Q 24In Nineteen Eighty-Four, why is the poet Ampleforth arrested?
He left the word 'God' in a Kipling poem
He left the word 'God' in a Kipling poem because nothing else would rhyme with 'rod'. Even in the cells he looks almost pleased, like a pedant delighted by his problem.
Q 25In Nineteen Eighty-Four, who denounces loyal Tom Parsons for cursing the Party in his sleep?
His young daughter
His young daughter, aged seven, listened at the keyhole and ran to the patrols. In the cells he is proud of her, and plans to thank the tribunal for saving him before it was too late.
Q 26What is the youth organisation the Parsons children belong to in Nineteen Eighty-Four called?
The Spies
The Spies have made the Parsons children so fierce that the boy fires a catapult at the hero's neck and calls him a traitor, while their mother looks on in helpless fright.
Q 27In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what is the hero's worst fear, used against him under torture?
Rats
Rats, in a wire cage made to fit over his face, are what finally break him. He screams for it to be done to the woman he loves instead, which is exactly the betrayal his captors wanted.
Q 28What is the number of the room in Nineteen Eighty-Four that holds each prisoner's worst nightmare?
101
101 is said to come from a BBC conference room where Orwell sat through tedious wartime meetings. The number is now shorthand for wherever a person's worst fear is waiting.
Q 29Which London building, wartime home of the Ministry of Information, inspired the hero's ministry in Nineteen Eighty-Four?
Senate House
Senate House, the University of London's white tower, held the wartime Ministry of Information. Orwell's first wife worked in its censorship department, so he knew from the inside the place he turned into a ministry of lies.
Q 30Which image does Nineteen Eighty-Four's torturer offer as a picture of the future?
A boot stamping on a face
A boot stamping on a face, for ever, is all he promises. The Party, he explains, is building no better world: what it wants is the thrill of trampling an enemy who is helpless.