Onions
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40 free Onions trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Few vegetables turn up in as many kitchens as the onion, and few have such an odd history. It has been buried with rulers, traded on a commodities exchange, blamed for election defeats and kept well away from the dog's dinner. It has also lent its name to church roofs, a privacy tool, a knight in a fantasy saga and one of America's best-known comedy brands. This quiz covers the plant itself (what a bulb really is, what makes you cry and how growers get it to swell), the named types from sweet regional varieties to the onion's close cousins, and the dishes built on it, from soup and dip to curry and cocktails. A run of health questions looks at what onions contain and why they are dangerous for pets, and a few more cover the satirical paper The Onion along with onions in books, music, film and games. It suits a food-themed quiz night, a classroom lesson on plants or cooking, or anyone who has ever wept over a chopping board and wondered why. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which major US city takes its name from a Native American word for a wild relative of the onion?
Chicago
Chicago comes from šikaakwa, a pungent woodland plant that the French explorer Henri Joutel found growing thickly in the area in the 1680s.
Q 02Which Atlantic island exported so many onions in the 1800s that its people are still nicknamed Onions?
Bermuda
Bermuda earned the nickname the onion patch, and Mark Twain called the crop the island's pride and joy; exports ended in 1946 once American growers had taken the market.
Q 03Which chemical element is at the heart of the gas that makes a freshly cut onion sting the eyes?
Sulfur
Sulfur taken up from the soil is stored inside the onion, and slicing frees enzymes that turn those compounds into a vapour that drifts up to the eyes.
Q 04Which ancient people saw the onion's rings as a symbol of eternal life and buried bulbs with their dead?
Egyptians
Egyptians revered the bulb so much that traces of onion were found in the eye sockets of the mummy of Ramesses IV.
Q 05Onions are toxic to dogs and cats because compounds in them destroy what in the animal's body?
Red blood cells
Red blood cells rupture after oxidising compounds in onion damage them, so a dog can turn anaemic days later; raw, cooked and powdered onion all carry the risk.
Q 06Which member of the onion family is a national emblem of Wales, worn on St David's Day?
Leek
Leek badges go back, in one legend, to a Welsh king who had his soldiers wear the vegetable on their helmets to tell friend from foe in a battle against the Saxons.
Q 07By law, Vidalia sweet onions can be grown only in a defined part of which US state?
Georgia
Georgia passed the Vidalia Onion Act in 1986 to protect the name, and four years later made the sweet onion its official state vegetable.
Q 08Which US restaurant chain put the deep-fried Bloomin' Onion on its menu when it opened in 1988?
Outback Steakhouse
Outback Steakhouse made it a signature starter and registered the name as a trademark, even though blooming onion is widely used as a generic term for the dish.
Q 09The fleshy layers of an onion bulb are modified versions of which part of the plant?
Leaves
Leaves build up food reserves in their swollen bases as the onion matures, so each ring you peel away is one of them, wrapped around a short, squashed stem.
Q 10In which 1998 children's novel do two runaway boys survive on a mountaintop by eating wild onions?
Holes
Holes sends Stanley and Zero up God's Thumb, where a week of wild onions keeps them alive and later keeps deadly lizards at bay.
Q 11China's People's Daily ran a 55-page photo spread in 2012 after The Onion named which leader Sexiest Man Alive?
Kim Jong-un
Kim Jong-un got the full treatment from the Communist Party paper's website, which repeated the spoof's gushing praise as if it were real; The Onion then hailed the paper as its subsidiary.
Q 12In which country were soaring onion prices blamed for bringing down the national government in 1980?
India
India treats the onion as a political vegetable: prices were also seen as decisive in two state elections in 1998, and a 2010 spike drew 20,000 protesters onto the streets of New Delhi.
Q 13Which church on Moscow's Red Square is crowned by a cluster of brightly patterned onion domes?
Saint Basil's Cathedral
Q 21Which future US president, then a Michigan congressman, sponsored the 1958 ban on onion futures trading?
Gerald Ford
Gerald Ford acted after two traders cornered the market, then flooded it until a 50-pound bag of onions sold for less than the sack that held it.
Q 22Which gin cocktail differs from a classic martini mainly by swapping the olive for a pickled onion?
Gibson
Gibson may honour the illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, who in one telling dared a New York bartender to improve on the martini.
Q 23Which curry, widely served in British curry houses, has a Persian name meaning 'two onions'?
Dopiaza
Dopiaza uses its onions in two ways: boiled into the gravy, then scattered raw or fried on top as a garnish.
Saint Basil's Cathedral was built on the orders of Ivan the Terrible, and each dome sits over a separate chapel; the whole is shaped like the flames of a bonfire.
Q 14Which anonymity network takes its name from the way it wraps traffic in onion-like layers of encryption?
Tor
Tor is short for The Onion Routing project, and the idea came from US Naval Research Laboratory staff in the mid-1990s, who nested encryption like the layers of an onion.
Q 15Cajun cooking's 'holy trinity' combines onion and celery with which third vegetable?
Bell peppers
Bell peppers take the place that carrots hold in a French mirepoix, the flavour base the Louisiana version grew out of.
Q 16Which Frito-Lay snack, launched in 1969, is a cornmeal ring flavoured to taste like fried onion?
Funyuns
Funyuns were going to be called OnYums until that name turned out to be another company's trademark, so a professor who also worked as a copywriter coined the new one.
Q 17Which Stax Records house band had a 1962 hit with the organ-driven instrumental Green Onions?
Booker T. & the M.G.'s
Booker T. & the M.G.'s came up with it only because another tune needed a B-side, and it was quickly reissued as an A-side in its own right.
Q 18Which band's 1968 song Glass Onion lent its title to a Daniel Craig murder mystery in 2022?
The Beatles
The Beatles put it on the White Album, and the film returns the favour by playing the track over its end credits.
Q 19Which Game of Thrones smuggler became the Onion Knight after slipping food into a besieged castle?
Davos Seaworth
Davos Seaworth ran onions and salted fish past a blockade to the starving garrison of Storm's End; Stannis knighted him, then cut off his fingertips for his smuggling past.
Q 20The satirical newspaper The Onion was started in 1988 by two students in which Wisconsin city?
Madison
Madison is home to the University of Wisconsin, where students Tim Keck and Christopher Johnson launched it as a weekly print paper.
Q 24Which French menu term, as in sautéed potatoes, signals that a dish is cooked with plenty of onions?
Lyonnaise
Lyonnaise means in the style of Lyon, and the best-known example is boiled potatoes sliced, shallow-fried and served with fried onions.
Q 25The 'Onion Johnnies' who sold onions door to door from their bicycles came from which French region?
Brittany
Brittany's farmers around Roscoff found a better market across the Channel than at home, and their striped shirts became the stock British image of a Frenchman.
Q 26French onion dip was created in 1954 with dried soup mix; by what name was it first widely known?
California dip
California dip came out of a Los Angeles kitchen; Lipton pushed the recipe on television and from 1958 printed it on its onion soup packets.
Q 27The cheese-topped version of French onion soup took shape in the 1800s around which Paris food market?
Les Halles
Les Halles restaurants grilled the soup under a thick layer of grated cheese; earlier recipes were just fried onions, water and croutons.
Q 28The Walla Walla sweet onion of Washington state grew from seed a French soldier brought from which island?
Corsica
Corsica supplied the seed around 1900, and growers then spent generations replanting only the sweetest, largest and roundest onions from each crop.
Q 29Which Hawaiian island gives its name to a sweet onion that is trademarked as 'Kula-grown'?
Maui
Maui growers raise them in Kula, a farming district that stretches across the western slopes of the Haleakalā volcano.
Q 30Which Roman author, later killed by the eruption of Vesuvius, recorded onions as a remedy for poor eyesight?
Pliny the Elder
Pliny the Elder also set down Roman claims that onions aided sleep and healed toothache, dog bites and even dysentery.