Numismatics and Coin Collecting
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50 free Numismatics and Coin Collecting trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Numismatics is the study and collecting of coins, paper money, medals and the odd objects people have used to pay for things. It is one of the oldest hobbies there is, and part of its pull is that every piece is a small historical record of who was in charge, what metal they could afford and what they wanted the world to believe. This quiz covers the ground a collector actually walks: famous rarities and the prices they have fetched, buried hoards and shipwreck treasure, the vocabulary of grading and mint errors, coins of Greece, Rome, Britain and the United States, and strange forms of money from around the world. It is written for collectors who want to test themselves, for club and classroom quiz hosts, and for anyone who has wondered why an old coin in a drawer might be worth more than its face value. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will finish with a few stories to tell at the next coin show.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01According to legend, the daughter of a San Francisco Mint chief spent a rare 1894 dime on which treat?
Ice cream
Ice cream is the legend's punchline: only 24 of the dimes were struck, nine are known to survive, and one sold for $1.9 million in 2007.
Q 02A Suffolk farmer's search for which lost tool in 1992 turned up the Hoxne Hoard of nearly 15,000 Roman coins?
A hammer
A hammer went missing in a field, and the friend who brought a metal detector to find it uncovered Britain's largest hoard of late Roman gold and silver. The tool went to the British Museum too.
Q 03A 100-kilogram Canadian gold coin called the Big Maple Leaf was stolen in 2017 from a museum in which city?
Berlin
Berlin's Bode Museum lost the coin in a night raid, and investigators who found gold dust on the thieves' clothes believe it was melted down. Its face value was a million Canadian dollars.
Q 04On which Pacific island group were giant limestone discs called rai, some too heavy to move, used as money?
Yap
Yap islanders tracked each stone's owner by oral history, so a disc could change hands without moving an inch. The largest is 3.6 metres across and weighs four tonnes.
Q 05The US Mercury dime of 1916 actually shows which figure, whose winged cap got her mistaken for a Roman god?
Liberty
Liberty wears a winged cap on the coin to stand for freedom of thought, but the public saw the messenger god and the wrong name stuck for good.
Q 06What animal name do numismatists give a coin struck from two dies never meant to be paired?
Mule
Mule coins borrow the name of the horse-donkey hybrid because their two sides come from different parents. A famous US error of 2000 pairs a state quarter's front with a dollar's back.
Q 07Fraudsters plated the 1883 US nickel, which lacked the word CENTS, and passed it off as which coin?
$5 gold piece
The $5 gold piece was almost the same width as the new nickel, which showed only a Roman numeral for its value. The Mint hurriedly redesigned the back to add the missing word.
Q 08Which country's copper plate money, in pieces weighing nearly 20 kilograms, led to Europe's first paper money?
Sweden
Sweden valued its coins by the copper in them, so its largest piece, worth 10 daler, was a sheet nobody could pocket. A Stockholm bank began printing paper notes in 1661.
Q 09Which animal appears on the one-tonne gold coin, some 80 centimetres wide, that the Perth Mint made in 2011?
Kangaroo
A kangaroo bounds across the coin, which took the title of world's biggest gold coin from Canada. It is legal tender with a face value of one million Australian dollars.
Q 10Which assassin of Julius Caesar issued a coin showing two daggers and a cap to mark the Ides of March?
Brutus
Brutus put his own portrait on the front and the letters EID MAR beneath the daggers. A rare gold example sold in London for £3.24 million in 2020.
Q 11Which animal features on China's gold bullion coins, with a fresh design almost every year since 1982?
Panda
Panda designs were frozen in 2001, but collectors objected so strongly that the mint went back to changing the artwork every year.
Q 12Which bird appears on the silver tetradrachms of ancient Athens?
Owl
Owl coins kept almost the same design for two centuries, which made them trusted trade money across the Mediterranean. Athenians simply called them little owls.
Q 13Which figure on horseback, modelled on a London hotel waiter, has graced Britain's gold sovereign since 1817?
Saint George
Saint George and the dragon were engraved by Benedetto Pistrucci, an Italian newly arrived in London. His initials appear on the coin beside the year.
Q 21Which term names the fine grooves on the edge of a coin, added to gold and silver pieces to expose clipping?
Reeding
Reeding made it plain when a thief had shaved slivers of precious metal from the rim, and it survives on base-metal coins such as US dimes and quarters.
Q 22On US paper money, which symbol at the end of a serial number marks a replacement for a misprinted note?
A star
A star stands in because no two notes in a series may share a serial number, so a spoiled note cannot simply be reprinted. Collectors pay extra for scarce runs.
Q 23Bullion coins are weighed in which unit of 31.1 grams, thought to be named after a French fair town?
Troy ounce
Troy ounce weights are about a tenth heavier than the kitchen kind, so an ounce of gold really does outweigh an ounce of feathers. The town is Troyes in Champagne.
Q 14On which day before Easter does the British monarch hand specially minted silver coins to elderly churchgoers?
Maundy Thursday
Maundy Thursday's gift comes in a white purse holding as many pence as the monarch is years old. The custom grew out of medieval kings washing the feet of the poor.
Q 15Which British coin, nicknamed a bob, was worth twelve old pence before decimal coins arrived in 1971?
Shilling
Shilling coins outlived the old system by nearly twenty years, passing as five new pence in British pockets until the end of 1990.
Q 16Which small bird replaced Britannia on the back of the British farthing in 1937?
Wren
Wren designs suited the least valuable British coin, since the bird is one of the country's smallest. The farthing stopped being legal tender at the start of 1961.
Q 17Which flower, the badge of Florence, was stamped on the gold florin first struck there in 1252?
Lily
Lily badges and a standing John the Baptist stayed on the coin for nearly three centuries with barely a change. Hungary's forint takes its name from the florin.
Q 18In ancient Greek custom, a coin placed in the mouth of the dead was payment for which mythological figure?
Charon
Charon's fee was an obol, a small coin, and archaeologists have found that real burials did include coins, though not always one and not always in the mouth.
Q 19Souvenir pressed pennies were first rolled in the United States at an 1893 world's fair held in which city?
Chicago
Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition sold the first American elongated coins, flattened and embossed with a new design as keepsakes of the fair.
Q 20What name is given to coins struck more than once with polished dies to give collectors a mirror-like finish?
Proof
Proof coins began as test pieces for checking that new dies were right, which is where the name comes from. Mints later struck them in quantity to sell to collectors.
Q 24Which colour gives collectors their nickname for the Guide Book of United States Coins, begun in 1946?
Red
Red covers have wrapped the price guide since its first edition, and the nickname became an official trademark. A sister handbook of dealer buying prices is named after a different cover.
Q 25What do collectors call the sealed plastic holder in which a grading company returns a certified coin?
Slab
Slab holders are sealed against tampering, and grading firms added holograms to them in 1989 to defeat counterfeiters.
Q 26What do collectors call the rainbow-hued colour change that silver coins develop by reacting with sulfur?
Toning
Toning is really a thin layer of tarnish, yet unusual colours and patterns can make a coin more desirable to collectors rather than less.
Q 27Which term, coined in 1960, covers collecting medals, badges and wooden nickels rather than money itself?
Exonumia
Exonumia joins the Greek for outside to the Latin for coin, so it literally means things outside coinage. Webster's dictionary accepted the word within five years.
Q 28Notaphily, a word coined in 1970 by a man at the stamp firm Stanley Gibbons, is the collecting of what?
Banknotes
Banknotes had been gathered seriously since the 1940s, but the hobby only split from coin collecting once it had a name of its own.
Q 29What do collectors call the scarcest issue in a coin series, such as the 1909-S VDB among Lincoln cents?
Key date
Key date coins usually had low mintages: only 484,000 of the 1909-S VDB were struck, so one coin can cost more than the rest of an album put together.
Q 30William Sheldon, creator of the 70-point coin grading scale, classified human body types in which profession?
Psychologist
Psychologist Sheldon built the scale in the 1940s for early American large cents, and the American Numismatic Association later based its grading standards on it.