Origami Trivia
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49 free Origami trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This origami trivia quiz covers the art of paper folding from Heian-era gift wrapping to computational crease patterns. The easy questions are the ones any folder knows: what ori and kami mean, which model is the most famous, what the thousand-crane tradition promises, what kirigami is, and what the playground fortune teller is also called. From there it moves into the history: the 1797 book that is the oldest folding manual, the German kindergarten ideas that banned cuts, Akira Yoshizawa's 50,000 models and his diagramming symbols, and the sad story of Sadako Sasaki. The hard end is for people who fold from crease patterns: Maekawa's and Kawasaki's theorems, the Huzita-Hatori axioms and angle trisection, Robert Lang's TreeMaker and circle packing, the Miura fold on Japanese satellites, the fold-and-cut theorem, wet-folding, Pureland, tessellations, and Britney Gallivan's twelve folds of toilet paper. There are also questions on washi, kami, teabag folding and the Peabody-winning documentary Between the Folds. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on origami, its history, its mathematics and its leading artists, and each question links to the page that establishes it. Fifty questions, free, with an explanation after every answer.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word origami combines two Japanese words meaning what?
Fold and paper
Fold and paper: ori is from oru, 'to fold'; the word once named a folded certificate, and in Edo-period Japan the pastime itself went by other names.
Q 02Which molecule did Caltech's Paul Rothemund fold into tiny stars and discs, a method now called origami?
DNA
DNA: he showed that one long strand, pinned by some 200 short 'staple' strands, folds itself into flat shapes only about 100 nanometres across.
Q 03Origami folders use which Japanese term for designs that involve cutting the paper?
Kirigami
Kirigami: kiri means 'to cut', and the word spread in the West through a best-selling 1960s paper-cutting set by the author Florence Temko.
Q 04Which Nintendo hero battles an army of Folded Soldiers in the 2020 game subtitled The Origami King?
Mario
Mario: in Paper Mario: The Origami King he teams up with Olivia, sister of the villain King Olly, who has folded Princess Peach into origami and bound her castle in giant streamers.
Q 05Folding a thousand paper cranes, senbazuru, is said to grant the folder what?
One wish
One wish: the number echoes the thousand years a crane was said to live, and strings of a thousand are now given to the seriously ill as a wish for their recovery.
Q 06Sadako Sasaki folded paper cranes in a Hiroshima hospital while fighting which illness, about ten years after the atomic bomb?
Leukaemia
Leukaemia: she was two when the bomb fell and fell ill years later, and when paper ran short in hospital she folded cranes from medicine wrappers.
Q 07In the best-known telling of Sadako's story, who finished folding her thousand cranes after she died?
Her school friends
Her school friends: the famous children's book has Sadako stopping at 644, but Hiroshima's peace museum says she in fact folded more than 1,300 herself.
Q 08Which US president brought paper cranes he had folded himself to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum?
Barack Obama
Barack Obama: on his 2016 visit he handed two cranes to local schoolchildren, then left two more beside the message he wrote in the museum's guest book.
Q 09Who is considered the grandmaster of modern origami, credited with the standard diagram symbols and inspiring a renaissance of the art?
Akira Yoshizawa
Akira Yoshizawa: he sold food door to door to get by until a picture magazine commissioned a set of origami zodiac figures from him and made his name.
Q 10Origami's grandmaster always refused to do what with his models?
Sell them
Sell them: he lent his models to exhibitions instead, and by his own 1989 estimate he had created more than 50,000 of them.
Q 11Emperor Hirohito awarded the grandmaster of origami which honour in 1983?
The Order of the Rising Sun
The Order of the Rising Sun: he had toured the world for years as a cultural ambassador for Japan, and he died in 2005 on his own 94th birthday.
Q 12In standard origami diagrams, what does a plain dashed line indicate?
A valley fold
A valley fold: the paper folds towards you, while dashes broken by dots mark a mountain fold, and the code lets folders follow a book printed in any language.
Q 13What is a wet-folded model's advantage over one folded dry?
Gentle curves rather than flat surfaces
Q 21Golden Venture folding, which builds showy models from great numbers of small folded units, is named after what?
A ship
A ship: the Golden Venture was wrecked off the American coast carrying migrants from China, and the flamboyant paper models they built while held in detention made the style known.
Q 22What holds the six folded paper units of a classic Sonobe cube together?
Tucked-in flaps
Tucked-in flaps: each unit's flaps slide into pockets on its neighbours and friction does the rest, which keeps modular folding true to origami's rule of no glue.
Q 23Pureland origami restricts folders to what?
Simple mountain and valley creases only
Gentle curves rather than flat surfaces: water softens the sizing, a glue inside the paper, so a damp sheet can be moulded, and the curves set hard as it dries.
Q 14In Blade Runner, which origami figure does the policeman Gaff leave outside Deckard's flat at the very end?
Unicorn
Unicorn: the director's cut shows Deckard daydreaming of one, and Ridley Scott says the silver-paper figure is Gaff's hint that the hero's memories are implants.
Q 15Which German educator's kindergarten system carried European paper folding into Japanese schools in the late 1800s?
Friedrich Fröbel
Friedrich Fröbel: the inventor of the kindergarten graded his paper lessons from playful Folds of Life to Folds of Truth, which taught geometry, and Folds of Beauty.
Q 16Which 18th-century luxury replaced castles and beasts folded from starched napkins as the showpiece of Europe's banquet tables?
Porcelain
Porcelain: china figures and centrepieces took over the table, and because a folded napkin is undone the moment it is used, no original sculpture survives in any museum.
Q 17The stylised bird known as the pajarita is an early example of paper folding from which country's tradition?
Spain
Spain: the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote a playful mock treatise on the little bird, folded his own variants of it and did much to make the pastime popular.
Q 18What is the name of Japan's traditional handmade paper, made from the fibres of the paper mulberry?
Washi
Washi: tough enough to cover Japan's sliding doors and paper screens as well as books, and the craft of making it by hand is on UNESCO's cultural heritage list.
Q 19What Japanese word, which simply means 'paper', do folders use for ordinary packaged origami squares coloured on one side?
Kami
Kami: far from an ancient craft paper, it is cheap machine-made stock, coloured on one side, that was first produced for school folding lessons.
Q 20Decorative modular folding balls, whose name means "medicine ball", are known as what?
Kusudama
Kusudama: the first ones are thought to have been bunches or bags of fragrant herbs hung in the house, which is why a paper flower ball carries a medicinal name.
Simple mountain and valley creases only: John Smith wanted models that beginners and disabled folders could manage, and experts then took up the limit as a puzzle in its own right.
Q 24Which landmark's geometric tilework, which had fascinated the artist Escher, inspired Chris Palmer to fold tessellations from one pleated sheet?
The Alhambra
The Alhambra: Palmer followed in Escher's footsteps to the Moorish palace in Granada, studied its repeating tile patterns and became a leading folder of tessellations.
Q 25An entomologist's paper insects grew into the yearly origami holiday tree at which New York institution?
American Museum of Natural History
American Museum of Natural History: Alice Gray of its insect department began by hanging a small tree with folded insects, and the museum now unveils a large tree of folded models every winter.
Q 26In Tom Angleberger's 2010 children's novel, a sixth-grader wears an origami finger puppet of which Star Wars character?
Yoda
Yoda: in The Strange Case of Origami Yoda the puppet dispenses advice from the finger of the class oddball Dwight, and his classmate Tommy compiles a case file to decide whether to trust it.
Q 27The rigid Miura fold has been used to deploy what from a folded position in space?
Solar panel arrays
Solar panel arrays: the Japanese space scientist Koryo Miura's pleat opens in one motion when its ends are pulled, so an array needs fewer motors, and the same fold lets a map open with a single pull.
Q 28Origami principles have been applied to the deployment of which two medical and automotive devices?
Stents and airbags
Both must unfold from a compact form reliably.
Q 29Paper folding can solve which two classical problems that are impossible with compass and straightedge?
Angle trisection and doubling the cube
Angle trisection and doubling the cube: a single fold can place two points onto two lines at once, which solves cubic equations, while compass and straightedge stop at quadratics.
Q 30By Maekawa's theorem, the creases meeting at any point inside a model that folds flat must always number what?
An even number
An even number: Jun Maekawa showed that the mountain folds and valley folds at such a point always differ by exactly two, so however many there are, their total cannot be odd.