Oklahoma City
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49 free Oklahoma City trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Oklahoma City went from empty prairie to a town of 10,000 in a single afternoon in April 1889, took the state capital from Guthrie, struck oil under its own Capitol building, and annexed so much land in the early 1960s that it briefly became the largest city in America by area. It is also the place where Bobby Troup told everyone to get their kicks on Route 66, where a 1999 tornado produced the fastest winds ever measured on Earth, and where a 1995 bombing is remembered with 168 empty chairs. These 49 questions cover the Land Run and the first mayor, the Great Annexation Drive, the MAPS sales-tax projects that built Bricktown's canal and brought the Thunder's arena, the Devon Tower and the planned Legends Tower, Will Rogers and Wiley Post, Tinker Air Force Base, the Museum of Osteology, the Capitol dome that waited 88 years, Lake Hefner, the Heartland Flyer and the Thunder's 2025 title. Easy questions stick to the state and the sports teams; the hard tier asks about mayors, record rainfall, James Beard winners and which two counties share the city limits with Oklahoma County. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you pick up something even when you miss.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Oklahoma City was founded during which 1889 event?
The Land Run
The Land Run opened the Unassigned Lands on April 22, 1889, and within hours some 10,000 homesteaders had staked claims around a railway stop called Oklahoma Station.
Q 02In 1935 Oklahoma City became the first city in the world to install which street fixture?
The parking meter
The parking meter was newspaperman Carl Magee's answer to downtown workers hogging every space all day; the first 175 went in on July 16, 1935, at a nickel an hour.
Q 03Which city was Oklahoma's territorial capital before the move to Oklahoma City?
Guthrie
Guthrie lost the capital in a statewide vote on June 11, 1910, and the state seal was moved to Oklahoma City so quickly that Guthrie's leaders long claimed it had been stolen in the night.
Q 04Which territory merged with Oklahoma Territory at statehood?
Indian Territory
Indian Territory's leaders had asked Congress for a state of their own at the Sequoyah Convention of 1905, but Washington insisted on one merged state, admitted on November 16, 1907.
Q 05Oklahoma City is namechecked in which 1946 Bobby Troup song?
Route 66
Route 66: Troup wrote it on a 1946 drive to Hollywood with his wife in their Buick, and Nat King Cole's recording helped send post-war holidaymakers out along the road it celebrates.
Q 06Which invention did Oklahoma City grocer Sylvan Goldman roll out in his Humpty Dumpty stores in the 1930s?
The shopping cart
The shopping cart began as a folding chair on wheels carrying two wire baskets, and shoppers shunned it until Goldman hired models to push carts around his stores.
Q 07The grounds of the Oklahoma State Capitol are famous for which unusual sight?
Oil derricks
Oil derricks arrived with the Oklahoma City field, struck south of town in December 1928; by 1935 it had spread to the north side, and wells were sunk on the statehouse grounds themselves.
Q 08Oklahoma's Capitol opened in 1917 without which feature, added in 2002?
A dome
A dome was allowed for in the design but left off to save money, so the building stood flat-topped for 85 years before its dome was finally added in 2002.
Q 09Which drive-in chain, born at a root beer stand in Shawnee, has its headquarters in Oklahoma City?
Sonic
Sonic began in 1953 as the Top Hat, where founder Troy Smith copied a car-side intercom he had seen in Louisiana and put his carhops on roller skates.
Q 10Which Thunder star won the 2014 MVP award and used his speech to call his mother 'the real MVP'?
Kevin Durant
Kevin Durant's tearful tribute to his mother, Wanda, turned into a catchphrase and then a Lifetime film about her, The Real MVP: The Wanda Durant Story.
Q 11Which downtown Oklahoma City attraction is home to the Crystal Bridge?
Myriad Botanical Gardens
Myriad Botanical Gardens holds the Crystal Bridge, a tropical conservatory; it grew out of I. M. Pei's urban-renewal plan, which called for razing hundreds of old downtown buildings and for a garden modelled on Copenhagen's Tivoli.
Q 12Oklahoma City's 1993 package to rebuild its downtown is known by which acronym?
MAPS
MAPS, the Metropolitan Area Projects plan, paid for a ballpark, an arena and a canal in cash out of a temporary sales tax, so the city took on no debt to build them.
Q 13Which Oklahoma City entertainment district has a canal plied by water taxis?
Bricktown
Q 21Which arts-and-crafts retail chain was founded in Oklahoma City in 1972 and is still based there?
Hobby Lobby
Hobby Lobby grew out of a $600 loan: David and Barbara Green borrowed it in 1970 to make miniature picture frames at home, and opened their first small shop two years later.
Q 22Which skyscraper proposed for Oklahoma City in 2024 was planned as the tallest in the US?
Legends Tower
Legends Tower was drawn at exactly 1,907 feet, a height chosen to match the year Oklahoma became a state, which would put it above New York's One World Trade Center.
Q 23A seven-mile stretch of which river through Oklahoma City was renamed the Oklahoma River in 2004?
North Canadian River
Bricktown was a district of red-brick warehouses that had largely emptied out before the city dug a mile-long canal through it, which opened in July 1999.
Q 14Which historic downtown Oklahoma City hotel was restored and reopened in 2007?
The Skirvin
The Skirvin stood empty for 19 years before its restoration, and it has a ghost story to match: in 2010 the New York Knicks blamed a loss to the Thunder on its haunted rooms.
Q 15At Oklahoma City's memorial, what stands for each 1995 bombing victim?
Empty chair
An empty chair stands for each of the 168 victims, set out in nine rows for the nine floors of the building, and nineteen of the chairs are smaller, for the children who died.
Q 16The Oklahoma City federal building destroyed in 1995 was named for which judge?
Alfred P. Murrah
Alfred P. Murrah was orphaned in his teens and first reached Oklahoma City as a stowaway on a freight train; he worked his way through school and was a federal judge at 32.
Q 17What species is the Oklahoma City memorial's Survivor Tree?
American elm
American elm: the tree took the full force of the blast, and it was nearly cut down afterwards so that investigators could recover evidence caught in its branches.
Q 18Oklahoma City native Ralph Ellison won the National Book Award for which 1952 novel?
Invisible Man
Invisible Man was the work of a man who had set out to be a musician: Ellison left Oklahoma City to study music at Tuskegee, and took up a literary career only after he moved to New York.
Q 19Which president signed the act creating the Oklahoma City National Memorial?
Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton signed the act in October 1997 and came back to dedicate the finished memorial himself on April 19, 2000, five years to the day after the bombing.
Q 20Oklahoma's tallest building as of 2025, completed in 2012, is named for which energy company?
Devon
Devon Energy's 50-storey tower tops every other building in the state, yet it has two fewer floors than the older BOK Tower in Tulsa, which it overtook.
The North Canadian River once flooded the city, and flood control later left it almost dry; dams and locks then turned the renamed stretch into a chain of lakes used for rowing races.
Q 24Oklahoma City's Stockyards City district grew up around one of the country's biggest markets for which animals?
Cattle
Cattle made the city's first big industry: in 1910 its boosters lured one of the country's big meat packers with a $300,000 bonus and a five-year tax holiday, and the stockyards opened that October.
Q 25Which is the only state capital larger than Oklahoma City by area?
Juneau
Juneau takes in about 2,700 square miles, most of it mountain and icefield so rugged that no road links the city to the rest of Alaska, against some 600 for Oklahoma City.
Q 26In 1958 Oklahoma City teacher Clara Luper led her students in one of the civil rights era's first what?
Sit-ins
Sit-ins: on August 19, 1958, her NAACP Youth Council pupils took seats at the Katz drugstore lunch counter and ordered Cokes, and the chain soon dropped its whites-only rule.
Q 27Which Oklahoma City suburb was struck by top-rated tornadoes in both 1999 and 2013?
Moore
Moore lay in the path of the 1999 storm, in which radar measured the fastest tornado winds then on record, over 300 mph, and in 2013 another top-rated tornado killed more than 20 people, seven of them children at a school in the town.
Q 28The 2013 El Reno tornado, west of Oklahoma City, went into the books as what?
Widest ever recorded
Widest ever recorded, at 2.6 miles across: it swelled and changed course so fast that it killed three veteran storm chasers, among them the researcher Tim Samaras.
Q 29Which month of 2015 set Oklahoma City's record for its wettest month?
May
May 2015 brought 19.48 inches of rain, more than in any month since records began in 1890, and ended in deadly floods across Oklahoma and Texas.
Q 30Which air base near Oklahoma City was Oklahoma's largest single-site employer in 2025?
Tinker
Tinker is named for Clarence Tinker, an Osage who rose to major general in the Army, whose bomber was lost at sea near Midway on a raid he led in June 1942.