Picnics
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40 free Picnics trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
A picnic sounds like the simplest meal there is: food, a blanket and somewhere pleasant to sit. Its history is anything but simple. The word began as a term for a shared indoor supper, aristocrats made it fashionable, and Victorian cooks turned it into a feast that needed a cart to carry. This quiz covers the whole spread. There are questions on where the word and the custom came from, on the food that travels well and the stories behind its names, and on the kit that makes eating outdoors possible, from the basket itself to the flask, the cooler and the bug candle. Others look at lawn games, at picnic traditions around the world, and at the picnics that turn up in novels, paintings, cartoons, musicals and a Cold War border protest. It is written for anyone planning a summer get-together, a family reunion, a company outing or a classroom party, and for anyone who simply likes knowing why things are called what they are. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the facts are ready to share over lunch.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01English borrowed the word picnic from which language, where it first appeared in a satirical verse of 1649?
French
French pique-nique meant a meal where every guest paid or brought a share, and only around 1800 did English speakers move it outdoors.
Q 02In which park does the cartoon character Yogi raid campers' picnic baskets while dodging Ranger Smith?
Jellystone
Jellystone Park spoofs Yellowstone, and the joke became real estate: a chain of family campgrounds has traded under the cartoon park's name since 1969.
Q 03Which toys gather for a picnic in the woods in the 1907 tune that Jimmy Kennedy set words to in 1932?
Teddy bears
Teddy bears were still a novelty when John Bratton wrote the tune: the toy had been named after President Theodore Roosevelt only five years earlier.
Q 04Which picnic toy is named after a Connecticut bakery whose empty pie tins Yale students tossed to one another?
Frisbee
Frisbee was what college students were already calling Wham-O's plastic Pluto Platter, so in 1957 the company made the nickname official.
Q 05Which picnic staple is named after an 18th-century English earl, said to have ordered it during long card games?
Sandwich
Sandwich honors John Montagu, the 4th Earl, whose valet is said to have brought him roast beef between two slices of toast so he could keep playing cribbage.
Q 06Which checked cotton fabric, a favorite for picnic blankets, did Dorothy wear as her blue dress in The Wizard of Oz?
Gingham
Gingham reached Europe in the 17th century as a striped cloth, and only became the familiar check when Manchester's mills began weaving it that way in the mid-1700s.
Q 07Which word for highly seasoned food, in print since 1786, names the mustard-spiked stuffed eggs of American picnics?
Deviled
Deviled sounded too sinful for some church suppers in the American South and Midwest, where the same dish is politely called stuffed, salad or dressed eggs.
Q 08At the Pan-European Picnic of 1989, hundreds of East Germans fled to Austria through a border gate in which country?
Hungary
Hungary let the gate near Sopron open for a peace picnic, and the escape that followed was the largest from East Germany since 1961; the Berlin Wall fell under three months later.
Q 09Which picnic-day contest of strength was part of the Summer Olympics from 1900 to 1920?
Tug of war
Tug of war at the 1908 London Games was a clean sweep for British police: teams from the City of London, Liverpool and the Metropolitan force took gold, silver and bronze.
Q 10Which song does Maria teach the von Trapp children during their mountain picnic in The Sound of Music?
Do-Re-Mi
Do-Re-Mi was a static number on stage, and the film turned it into a montage around Salzburg, with the picnic itself shot above the town of Werfen.
Q 11What color must guests wear to the secret-location outdoor dinner that François Pasquier started in Paris in 1988?
White
White was a practical idea: Pasquier asked friends to wear it to his first dinner in the Bois de Boulogne so they could find one another. The event is now called Dîner en Blanc.
Q 12Which chemical signals do ants lay along the ground so that nestmates can follow the trail to a picnic's food?
Pheromones
Pheromones let foraging ants range up to 200 meters from the nest and still find their way home, even in the dark.
Q 13Which novelist sends her characters on a bad-tempered picnic to Box Hill in Surrey in the novel Emma?
Jane Austen
Jane Austen was among the first English novelists to name the picnic, and Emma holds two: strawberry picking at Donwell Abbey and the quarrelsome outing to Box Hill.
Q 21Which carmaker turned factory wood scraps into charcoal briquettes, later sold with portable grills as Picnic Kits?
Henry Ford
Henry Ford first sold the briquettes only through his car dealerships, and the business was renamed Kingsford after new owners bought it in 1951.
Q 22Which author opened his 1908 riverbank novel with Rat packing a wicker luncheon basket for a picnic with Mole?
Kenneth Grahame
Kenneth Grahame first told the tales as bedtime stories for his son Alastair, and their opening riverside lunch became a model of the English country picnic.
Q 23On which holiday in 1900 do the schoolgirls of Picnic at Hanging Rock vanish in Joan Lindsay's Australian mystery?
Valentine's Day
Q 14What do the British call a large wicker picnic basket, a word Americans mostly use for a laundry container?
Hamper
Hamper is probably a worn-down form of hanaper, the medieval case that held a large goblet, so the word was carrying drinks long before it carried lunch.
Q 15Which lemon-scented oil, taken from a tropical grass, is burned in garden and picnic candles to deter mosquitoes?
Citronella
Citronella has been a registered insect repellent in the United States since 1948, although studies find the candles do little to keep mosquitoes away.
Q 16Which brand of airtight picnic containers, launched in 1946, was sold at home parties championed by Brownie Wise?
Tupperware
Tupperware began with a bell-shaped tub by Earl Tupper, who had worked at DuPont, and its party plan gave 1950s women a way to earn without holding a regular job.
Q 17From which language does coleslaw take its name, an 18th-century borrowing of a term meaning cabbage salad?
Dutch
Dutch koolsla means cabbage salad, and early American writers often heard its first half as cold, giving the folk spelling cold slaw that stayed common until the 1860s.
Q 18Which painter scandalized Paris in 1863 with a picnic scene of a nude woman lunching beside two fully dressed men?
Édouard Manet
Édouard Manet saw Luncheon on the Grass rejected by the official Salon jury, so he hung it in the Salon des Refusés, where it drew crowds and outrage.
Q 19What is the Japanese name for the custom of picnicking beneath blossoming cherry trees, known since the Heian court?
Hanami
Hanami is said to have begun with plum blossom, admired in the Nara period in imitation of a Chinese custom, before cherry trees took over the party.
Q 20Which tennis tournament's ticketless fans picnic on a grassy bank nicknamed Henman Hill, facing a giant screen?
Wimbledon
Wimbledon's hill is officially Aorangi Terrace, and its nickname shifts with British hopes: fans have also called it Murray Mound and Raducanu Rise.
Valentine's Day 1900 saw no such vanishing: Lindsay framed the novel as a true story, but its events are apparently fictional, and she said the plot came to her in dreams.
Q 24Which Piccadilly store, famed for its luxury picnic baskets, claims to have invented the Scotch egg in 1738?
Fortnum & Mason
Fortnum & Mason began in 1707 with a royal footman, William Fortnum, who made money on the side by reselling the half-used candles of Queen Anne's household.
Q 25Which Japanese word names the boxed meal packed for outdoor lunches and sold at railway stations as ekiben?
Bento
Bento grew out of dried rice carried to work in the Kamakura period, and the first station version, sold in 1885, is believed to have held two rice balls and pickled radish.
Q 26On which holiday do Italians traditionally head to the countryside for a family picnic, a day they nickname Pasquetta?
Easter Monday
Easter Monday is an official public holiday in Italy, formally the Monday of the Angel, and friends often turn the outing into a barbecue.
Q 27From which part of the pig does a so-called picnic ham come, a cured cut that is no true ham?
Shoulder
Shoulder meat from the lower arm is cured on the bone to make it, while the upper part of the same section is the confusingly named Boston butt.
Q 28In which country do families spend Sizdah Be-dar, the thirteenth day of the Nowruz new year, picnicking outdoors?
Iran
Iran also calls the festival Nature Day; sizdah is the Persian word for thirteen, and the outing marks the end of the Nowruz holidays.
Q 29Which tree's flexible young shoots, known as osiers or withies, are traditionally woven into wicker picnic baskets?
Willow
Willow was used for its flexibility and because it is easy to grow and harvest; the word wicker itself comes from a Scandinavian word for willow.
Q 30In tech-support slang, the acronym PICNIC says the problem is not in the computer but in which other place?
The chair
The chair is where the user sits: PICNIC is help-desk shorthand for user error, a cousin of PEBKAC, which puts the problem between keyboard and seat.