Purple Trivia
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50 free Purple trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
49 free Purple trivia questions with answers. Purple is the colour of emperors, mourning bishops, Prince and a certain dinosaur, and this quiz covers all of it. Forty-five questions run from the sea snails of ancient Tyre and the Byzantine 'born in the purple' to William Perkin's accidental invention of mauve, the Purple Heart, Purple Rain, the Purple People Eaters, amethysts, purple carrots, purple prose and the Purple Forbidden City. It is built for colour-themed trivia nights, classroom warm-ups and anyone who likes a quiz where the questions wander through history, science, music and pop culture. Easy questions ask which two colours mix to make purple; hard ones want the chemical in Tyrian dye and the year the Catholic Church's banned-books list ended. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the colour, its dyes and the things named after it, and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In the RGB colour model, purple is made by mixing which two colours of light?
Red and blue
Red and blue light mixed together give purple on a screen; purple has no single wavelength of its own, which is why it is called a non-spectral colour.
Q 02Which colour sits at the short-wavelength end of the visible spectrum, just before ultraviolet?
Violet
Purple, by contrast, is a mixture and never appears in a rainbow.
Q 03Who divided the visible spectrum into seven named colours in 1704?
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton, in his 1704 Opticks, named seven spectral colours including indigo; he is said to have chosen seven to match the notes of the musical scale.
Q 04Tyrian purple, the dye of emperors, was extracted from what?
Sea snails
Predatory rock snails of the Muricidae family secrete it; the smell of the dye works was notorious.
Q 05Tyrian purple takes its name from a city in which ancient civilisation?
Phoenicia
Phoenicia: Tyre, now in Lebanon, was the Phoenician city whose dye works gave the colour its name; the word Phoenicia itself may come from the Greek for purple-red.
Q 06Roughly how many murex molluscs were needed to yield 1.4 grams of pure Tyrian dye?
12,000
12,000 Murex brandaris snails yielded just 1.4 grams of pure dye, enough to colour only the trim of one garment.
Q 07Unusually for an ancient dye, what happened to Tyrian purple when exposed to sunlight and weather?
It became brighter
It became brighter: unlike most ancient dyes, Tyrian purple intensified with weathering and sunlight rather than fading, and that colour-fastness was a big part of why it was prized.
Q 08By the fourth century AD, who was the only person in Rome permitted to wear Tyrian purple?
The emperor
The emperor alone could wear it: sumptuary laws tightened steadily until, by the fourth century, Roman emperors reserved the dye for themselves and made wearing it treason.
Q 09What is the coloured compound in Tyrian purple?
6,6'-dibromoindigo
6,6'-dibromoindigo, the pigment in Tyrian purple, is a close chemical cousin of indigo with two bromine atoms attached.
Q 10Which Roman author's Natural History describes extracting Tyrian purple from murex snails?
Pliny the Elder
Pliny the Elder's Natural History, Book 9, describes how the dye was taken from the snail's gland and simmered in lead vats; he called the finest shade the colour of clotted blood.
Q 11The Byzantine title porphyrogennetos, 'purple-born', went to a ruler's child who was born when?
After the father took the throne
After the father took the throne: the title was reserved for children born to a reigning emperor, delivered in the Porphyra, a chamber of the Great Palace lined with purple porphyry stone.
Q 12Roman senators and senior magistrates were entitled to wear what purple detail on their togas?
A stripe
A stripe: magistrates wore the toga praetexta with a purple border, and senators a broad purple stripe, the latus clavus; under the empire, full purple without permission could be punished as treason.
Q 13Which ruler was crowned emperor in 800 in Tyrian purple and buried in a purple shroud?
Q 21For what is the Purple Heart awarded?
Being wounded or killed in service
About 1.5 million were manufactured in World War II, many in anticipation of an invasion of Japan that never came.
Q 22Purple, green and white were the colours of which early-20th-century movement?
Women's suffrage
Women's suffrage: the WSPU adopted purple for dignity, white for purity and green for hope in 1908, and suffragettes wore the tricolour on sashes and badges.
Q 23In Nazi concentration camps, prisoners made to wear a purple triangle belonged to which group?
Jehovah's Witnesses
Charlemagne
Charlemagne was crowned emperor in Rome on Christmas Day 800 in a mantle of Tyrian purple; he died at Aachen in 814 and was buried in a purple Byzantine silk shroud that survives.
Q 14In 1464 Pope Paul II decreed cardinals should swap Tyrian purple for which colour?
Scarlet
The dye's supply had collapsed after Constantinople fell, and scarlet from kermes insects took its place.
Q 15Which culture developed the first synthetic purple pigment, around 700 BC?
China
China: Han purple, a barium copper silicate first made in the Zhou era, was used to paint the Terracotta Army; it is the earliest known synthetic purple pigment.
Q 16What was 18-year-old William Perkin trying to make in 1856 when he accidentally created the dye mauveine?
Quinine
Quinine, the malaria drug, was his target; his professor August Hofmann had set the challenge, and instead the 18-year-old Perkin founded the synthetic dye industry with his aniline purple.
Q 17The name mauve comes from the French word for which flower?
Mallow
Mallow: the French mauve names the mallow flower, whose petals match the dye's shade; Perkin's dye was sold as aniline purple before the name mauve caught on in 1859.
Q 18Which monarch made mauve fashionable with a mauveine-dyed silk gown at the 1862 Royal Exhibition?
Queen Victoria
The colour became so common that Punch magazine joked about an outbreak of mauve measles.
Q 19Who established the Badge of Military Merit, forerunner of the Purple Heart, in 1782?
George Washington
George Washington created the Badge of Military Merit on 7 August 1782 at his Newburgh, New York, headquarters; only three awards are documented, and it lapsed after the Revolution.
Q 20The Purple Heart was revived in 1932 to mark what?
Washington's 200th birthday
Washington's 200th birthday, 22 February 1932, was the occasion: the Army revived the badge as the Purple Heart by general order, with Washington's profile on the medal.
Jehovah's Witnesses, called Bibelforscher by the Nazis, wore the purple triangle for refusing military service and the Hitler salute; other groups were marked with red, black, pink and other colours.
Q 24Prince's Purple Rain spent how many consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard 200?
24
24 weeks, from August 1984 to January 1985, was its run atop the Billboard 200; the album also won the Oscar for Best Original Song Score.
Q 25Which Purple Rain track's lyrics helped prompt Tipper Gore to campaign for Parental Advisory stickers?
Darling Nikki
Darling Nikki's explicit opening lyric shocked Tipper Gore when she heard her 11-year-old daughter playing it; the PMRC's 'Filthy Fifteen' list put the song at number one.
Q 26Which Prince single from Purple Rain was his first Billboard Hot 100 number one?
When Doves Cry
When Doves Cry topped the Hot 100 for five weeks in summer 1984, Prince's first number one; famously the track has no bass line.
Q 27Jimi Hendrix said the title of Purple Haze came from what?
A dream of walking under the sea
A dream of walking under the sea, Hendrix said, inspired the title; the 1967 single reached number three in the UK, and in concert he sometimes sang 'kiss this guy' as a joke.
Q 28What was sprayed on anti-apartheid protesters in Cape Town on 2 September 1989?
Purple dye from a water cannon
Purple dye from a police water cannon drenched the marchers; a protester turned the cannon on National Party headquarters, and graffiti soon declared 'The purple shall govern'.
Q 29Amethyst is a purple-hued variety of which mineral?
Quartz
Quartz: amethyst is silicon dioxide whose iron impurities, irradiated naturally in the rock, produce the violet colour.
Q 30The name amethyst comes from Greek words meaning what?
Not intoxicated
Not intoxicated: Greek amethystos joins a- ('not') to methyo ('I am drunk'); the ancients believed the stone warded off drunkenness and drank from amethyst cups.