Pembroke Welsh Corgi Trivia
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47 free Pembroke Welsh Corgi trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Pembroke Welsh Corgi trivia quiz covers the little cattle dog of Pembrokeshire from every angle: what 'corgi' means in Welsh, the Spitz ancestry and Flemish settlers of 1107, how the Pembroke differs from the Cardigan, the fox-like head, weights and speed, the 'fluffy' fault, the tax-law reason tails were docked, the fairy saddle and the Tylwyth Teg. Breed-club history runs from the 1925 Corgi Club in Carmarthen and Shan Fach's 1928 championship through the 1934 split, Little Madam's £12 purchase at Paddington and the Vulnerable Native Breeds list. The royal corgis get a full section: Dookie, Susan and her honeymoon under the rugs, the biting record, dorgis and Pipkin, wicker baskets, the tipsy footman, the 2012 Bond sketch, Willow, and the puppies of 2021. Pop culture rounds it off with Ein of Cowboy Bebop, Cheddar of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Corgi Toys and The Queen's Corgi. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one, and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its citation. If you enjoy it, try our Dogs and Queen Elizabeth II quizzes next.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What does the word 'corgi' mean in Welsh?
Dwarf dog
Dwarf dog. The name joins the Welsh cor, dwarf, and ci, dog; Welsh softens the c to a g inside a compound, which is why nobody says 'corci'.
Q 02The Pembroke Welsh Corgi was originally bred to herd which animals?
Cattle
Cattle. Standing barely a foot tall, a corgi could dart in behind a herd many times its size and stay low enough for the answering kicks to sail over its head.
Q 03Pembrokeshire and Cardiganshire, home of the two corgi breeds, lie in which part of Wales?
West Wales
West Wales. Cardiganshire returned to the map as a county in April 1996 and lasted a single day before it was renamed Ceredigion, so the Cardigan corgi now carries a county name that its own county gave up.
Q 04The Pembroke Welsh Corgi descends from which family of dogs?
Spitz
Spitz. The pricked ears and pointed muzzle are family traits; the breed club isn't sure which northern dogs its ancestors were, but every candidate it names, the Pomeranian and the Schipperke among them, is a spitz.
Q 05Why did Elizabeth II stop breeding corgis late in her reign?
To leave none behind
To leave none behind. After owning more than 30 corgis, she is said to have told a friend who urged her to keep going that she didn't want any young dog to outlive her.
Q 06Which herding breed tops Stanley Coren's intelligence ranking, where the Pembroke is 11th?
Border Collie
Border Collie. The two work in opposite ways: the collie runs round to the front and gathers the flock, while the corgi, just outside Coren's top ten, pushes its animals forward from behind.
Q 07Which feature has traditionally set the Cardigan Welsh Corgi apart from the Pembroke at a glance?
Its long, bushy tail
Its long, bushy tail. The Pembroke's is docked or naturally stubby, and the American breed club sums up the difference in four words: 'the Cardigan has one'.
Q 08The breed standard says a Pembroke's head should resemble that of which animal?
A fox
A fox. Judges even check the geometry: lines run from the nose tip through the eyes to the ear tips, and across, should make a near-perfect equilateral triangle.
Q 09What did Elizabeth II personally fill with toys and biscuits for each of her corgis once a year?
A Christmas stocking
A Christmas stocking. Each dog had its own at Sandringham, because the pack went wherever the Queen did, travelling between palaces by train, limousine and even helicopter.
Q 10The Pembroke's double coat is naturally water- and dirt-repellent, except in which long-coated variant?
'Fluffies'
The long, thin coat comes from a recessive gene and counts as a breed fault.
Q 11The 1936 picture book Our Princesses and Their Dogs, starring two royal corgis, went on sale days before which event?
Edward VIII's abdication
Edward VIII's abdication. Its photographs of the Yorks as a cosy dog-loving family reached the shops just as the crisis made the princesses' father king, a stroke of royal public relations.
Q 12Which coat colour is accepted on a Cardigan Welsh Corgi but has no place in the Pembroke standard?
Blue merle
Blue merle. Among corgis the marbled grey-and-black coat is the Cardigan's alone, and breeders avoid mating two merles, because puppies that inherit the gene from both parents run a far higher risk of deafness and poor sight.
Q 13Before the railways, corgis helped drovers walk Welsh livestock more than 200 miles to which London market?
Q 21Under which kennel name, borrowed from a royal residence, were Elizabeth II's home-bred corgis registered?
Windsor
Windsor. The Queen ran her breeding programme from the castle grounds and gave many puppies away as presents, but she never sold a single one and kept them out of the show ring.
Q 22The corgi Muick, given to Elizabeth II in 2021, was named after a loch on which royal estate?
Balmoral
Balmoral. Loch Muick lies in the hills of the Queen's Highland estate and the puppy's name is said the same way, 'Mick'; he arrived in lockdown to lift her spirits while Prince Philip was in hospital.
Q 23Which studio put a lost Welsh corgi at the heart of its 1963 television film Little Dog Lost?
Walt Disney
Smithfield
Smithfield. The long droves ended when the railways came and took the corgi's main job with them; the breed survived as a farmyard all-rounder until the show ring discovered it in the 1920s.
Q 14Degenerative myelopathy, the spinal disease that puts some elderly Pembroke corgis in wheelchairs, closely resembles which human illness?
ALS (motor neurone disease)
ALS (motor neurone disease). Geneticists studying affected Pembrokes traced the dog illness to a mutation in SOD1, a gene already tied to ALS in people, which gave researchers a naturally occurring animal model of the human disease.
Q 15Which short-legged Scandinavian herding dog looks so like a corgi that the two may share Viking-age ancestors?
Swedish Vallhund
Swedish Vallhund. Nobody is sure which way the dogs sailed: one theory has Vikings bringing Vallhunds to Wales, another has them carrying corgis home to Sweden.
Q 16The royal corgi Monty was named after Monty Roberts, an American friend of Elizabeth II famous as what?
A horse whisperer
A horse whisperer. In 1989 the Queen invited the American cowboy to show her stable staff his gentle 'Join-Up' method and kept him on as an adviser; his namesake corgi began life as the Queen Mother's dog.
Q 17The Cardigan Welsh Corgi, the older of the two breeds, is traditionally said to have reached Wales with which people?
Celtic
Celtic. The American Kennel Club dates the arrival to about 1200 BC, some two thousand years before the Pembroke appears, though a rival theory gives the credit to Norse settlers instead.
Q 18Sutter Brown, a Pembroke corgi, was known in the 2010s as the 'First Dog' of which US state?
California
California. Governor Jerry Brown's corgi, named after Gold Rush pioneer John Sutter, trotted along to political events and was credited with warming up his owner's famously cerebral image.
Q 19Until the 1930s, how did the Kennel Club register Pembroke and Cardigan corgis?
As one breed
As one breed. The two types were shown and even bred together for about ten years, and when the split came some owners were simply left to say which kind their own dog was.
Q 20Which American illustrator set three picture books in Corgiville, a village of corgis?
Tasha Tudor
Tasha Tudor. She wrote about what she lived with: a pack of her own corgis shared the Vermont home where she worked, and the house became known as Corgi Cottage.
Walt Disney. Its hero, a corgi terrified of brooms since puppyhood, is swept away from his family in a storm and on his travels saves an old woman trapped under her overturned cart.
Q 24British registrations of Pembroke corgi puppies peaked at nearly 9,000 a year within a decade of which event?
Elizabeth II's coronation
Elizabeth II's coronation. The breed hit its high in 1960, seven years after the ceremony, then slid so far that by 2014 only 274 puppies were registered and it was listed as vulnerable.
Q 25The Kennel Club credited the Pembroke's UK revival partly to which Netflix series?
The Crown
The Crown. Interest jumped when the second season showed a young Queen surrounded by her dogs, and in 2018 the Pembroke came off the Kennel Club's at-risk lists for the first time since 2009.
Q 26Which photographer shot Elizabeth II with her corgis and dorgis for a Vanity Fair cover marking her 90th birthday?
Annie Leibovitz
Annie Leibovitz. Her first royal sitting, in 2007, made headlines when a BBC trailer was cut to suggest the Queen had stormed out; the BBC apologised, and nine years on Leibovitz was asked back.
Q 27In Welsh folklore, corgis are said to have been gifted to human children by whom?
The Tylwyth Teg (fairies)
The Tylwyth Teg (fairies). In one telling, two children stumbled on a fairy funeral and were handed the fallen riders' steeds; the band of different fur over a corgi's shoulders is said to be the saddle mark.
Q 28What was the name of the first royal corgi, brought home by the future King George VI in 1933?
Dookie
Dookie. The family picked him from three puppies because he had enough tail to wag, so they could tell when he was pleased; his name is said to come from his new owner's title, Duke of York.
Q 29The corgi Susan was given to Princess Elizabeth as a present for which occasion?
Her 18th birthday
Her 18th birthday. The puppy she was given in 1944 founded a dynasty: every corgi the Queen went on to breed was descended from Susan, and she kept more than 30 of them herself.
Q 30How did the corgi Susan leave for Princess Elizabeth's honeymoon in 1947?
Hidden under rugs in the open carriage
Hidden under rugs in the open carriage. The princess refused to be parted from her, so Susan rode along out of sight as the newlyweds drove through London on the way to their honeymoon.