Parts of Speech
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50 free Parts of Speech trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every English word has a job. Some name things, some describe, some join, and a handful exist only to be shouted. Sorting words by the work each one does is one of the oldest ideas in grammar, and it is still the fastest way to see why a sentence holds together or falls apart. This quiz covers the eight classes taught in school (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections) along with the finer labels that turn up in high school English: types of noun and pronoun, helper verbs, verb forms that moonlight as other classes, and words that change class without changing spelling. Many questions ask you to pick out one class from a film or book title; others follow the story of the system itself, from ancient scholars to writers who waged war on a single kind of word. The early questions suit a class warm-up; the later ones are hard enough for an advanced or honors group. Each answer comes with a short explanation, so the set works for revision, as a printable worksheet, or simply for settling an argument about what a word is doing.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which horror novelist's writing memoir declares that the road to hell is paved with adverbs?
Stephen King
Stephen King made the claim in On Writing, adding that he would shout it from the rooftops. The 2000 book is half autobiography, half guide to the craft.
Q 02Which American humorist wrote the maxim 'As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out'?
Mark Twain
Mark Twain put the line in Pudd'nhead Wilson, where every chapter opens with sayings from the title character's calendar. The townsfolk take the calendar as proof that Wilson is a fool.
Q 03Which European language capitalises every noun, not just the names of people and places?
German
German capitalises all nouns, so 'the house' is written 'das Haus'. Danish followed the same rule until a spelling reform abolished it in 1948.
Q 04Which company's name entered the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb in 2006, against its owners' wishes?
Google entered the dictionary as a verb on June 15, 2006. The company has discouraged the usage, fearing its trademark could turn into a generic word for any web search.
Q 05Which word game by Leonard Stern and Roger Price labels its blanks 'noun', 'verb' and so on?
Mad Libs
Mad Libs went unnamed for five years, until its creators overheard an actor in a New York restaurant say he wanted to 'ad-lib' an interview.
Q 06Which cartoon characters, created by the Belgian artist Peyo, swap nouns and verbs for their own name?
The Smurfs
The Smurfs say things like 'We're going smurfing on the River Smurf today'. Peyo invented the original French word, schtroumpf, at a meal when he could not remember the word for salt.
Q 07Which TV franchise opens with the classic split infinitive, an adverb wedged between 'to' and 'go'?
Star Trek
Star Trek opens with a promise 'to boldly go', which parks 'boldly' inside the infinitive. Grammarians once ruled that an adverb must never sit between 'to' and its verb.
Q 08Which American city's name, repeated eight times in a row, makes a grammatical English sentence?
Buffalo
Buffalo fills three roles in the sentence: the city, the animal and a verb meaning to outwit or intimidate. Steven Pinker featured it in his book The Language Instinct.
Q 09Which Lewis Carroll poem keeps normal English syntax while inventing words like 'slithy' and 'toves'?
Jabberwocky
Jabberwocky keeps English syntax and verse forms, so readers sense that 'slithy' describes the 'toves' without knowing either word. Humpty Dumpty later explains slithy as 'lithe and slimy'.
Q 10Which Saturday-morning ABC series taught children grammar with the song 'Conjunction Junction'?
Schoolhouse Rock
Schoolhouse Rock gave its second season, Grammar Rock, to nouns, verbs, adjectives and the other word types. The animated shorts ran between the network's cartoons from 1973.
Q 11Which word in the title of the time-travel film 'Back to the Future' is a preposition?
To
To is a preposition here, pointing toward a destination. Put the same word in front of a verb, as in 'to go', and it becomes the marker of the infinitive instead.
Q 12Which of these is a collective noun, the kind British English often pairs with a plural verb?
team
Team is a collective noun, one word for a whole group, so Britons can say 'the team have finished' and mean its members. American English almost always keeps the verb singular.
Q 13Which pronoun is the object form of 'who', as in the letter opening 'To ___ It May Concern'?
whom
Whom is the objective form of who, though plain 'who' has long replaced it in informal English. One linguist blames its decline on its being a rare inflected leftover in modern grammar.
Q 21Which word in the title of the Leonardo DiCaprio film 'Catch Me If You Can' is a conjunction?
If
If is a subordinating conjunction: it hooks the dare 'catch me' to the condition 'you can'. 'Can' is a modal verb, while 'me' and 'you' are pronouns.
Q 22Which word in the title of the magician heist film 'Now You See Me' is an adverb?
Now
Now is most commonly an adverb of time, here telling when the seeing happens. 'You' and 'me' are both pronouns, and 'see' is the verb they share.
Q 23Which word in the title of the Coen brothers' film 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' is a verb?
Art
Art is the old second-person singular of 'be', the form that goes with 'thou'. The title comes from the 1941 comedy Sullivan's Travels, whose director hero wants to film a book of that name.
Q 14Which of these is a coordinating conjunction, one of the seven words in the FANBOYS mnemonic?
nor
Nor is the N in FANBOYS: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so. When, than and since are subordinating conjunctions, which open a clause that cannot stand alone.
Q 15Which of these words ending in -ly is an adjective, although most -ly words are adverbs?
lonely
Lonely is an adjective, like lively and ugly, despite its -ly ending. Such words have no neat adverb form, so English falls back on phrases like 'in a silly way'.
Q 16Which term names an -ing verb form doing a noun's job, like 'playing' in 'Playing chess is fun'?
Gerund
A gerund names the activity itself, so it can be the subject of a sentence. In 'the boys playing chess' the same -ing form is traditionally labelled a participle, because it describes the boys.
Q 17Which of these is a modal verb, a helper that never takes an -s ending in the third person?
might
Might is a modal verb, alongside can, could, may, must, shall, should, will and would. Modals also lack participles, so nobody has ever been caught 'mighting'.
Q 18Which of these is a mass noun, a word that normally has no plural and cannot follow 'a'?
furniture
Furniture is a mass noun: seven chairs can be counted, but they add up to 'furniture', never 'furnitures'. The pea went the other way, split off from the Middle English mass noun pease.
Q 19Which of these is a reflexive pronoun, the kind that points back to the subject of its own clause?
myself
Myself is a reflexive pronoun, as in 'I taught myself'. Informal speech also slips it in where plain 'me' would do, as in 'She stood by Jane and myself'.
Q 20Which word is the superlative of the adjective 'bad', one step beyond its comparative form?
worst
Worst is the superlative of bad, and worse the comparative. Linguists call such unrelated-looking sets suppletive, the same pattern seen in good, better, best.
Q 24Which of these is a noun when its first syllable is stressed and a verb when its second is?
permit
Permit follows a pattern shared by record, rebel and conduct: English moves the stress to the first syllable when such verbs are used as nouns.
Q 25Which term names the word a pronoun refers back to, like 'Maria' in 'Maria lost her keys'?
Antecedent
The antecedent usually comes first, but in 'When she arrived, Maria sat down' it trails its pronoun. Strictly speaking, it is then a postcedent.
Q 26Which comic strip coined the line 'Verbing weirds language' in a joke about turning nouns into verbs?
Calvin and Hobbes
Calvin and Hobbes ended a strip on the habit with that punchline, which practises what it mocks: both 'verb' and 'weird' are pressed into service as verbs.
Q 27Which linguist wrote 'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously' as a grammatical sentence with no meaning?
Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky composed it for his 1957 book Syntactic Structures. Two adjectives, a noun, a verb and an adverb sit in perfectly legal order while the meaning collapses.
Q 28Which prime minister is doubtfully credited with the preposition-mocking quip 'up with which I will not put'?
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill gets the credit, though the attribution is apocryphal. The ban on ending a sentence with a preposition caught on after the poet John Dryden attacked the habit in 1672.
Q 29Which constructed language, first published in 1887, ends every common noun in -o and every adjective in -a?
Esperanto
Esperanto wears its grammar on its sleeve: derived adverbs end in -e as well, so a reader can tell what job a word does before knowing what it means.
Q 30Which pronoun did the American Dialect Society crown Word of the Decade for the 2010s?
They
They won for its use as a singular pronoun for nonbinary people. Merriam-Webster had already named it Word of the Year for 2019.