Seattle Trivia
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128 free Seattle trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Seattle trivia quiz has 128 questions on the Emerald City, from the Denny Party landing at Alki Point in 1851 to the Sphere-era boom of the 2020s. The easy questions are for anyone who has visited or watched Frasier: the tower built for the 1962 World's Fair, the market where they throw the fish, the coffee chain that started there, the mountain on the horizon and the nickname of the football crowd. The harder ones are for locals and history buffs: the glue pot that started the Great Fire, the ton of gold on the S.S. Portland, why the streets in Pioneer Square were raised, the billboard about turning out the lights, and which street is the only one to run unbroken from Elliott Bay to Lake Washington. The quiz covers the city's history, geography and weather, its landmarks and neighbourhoods, its music from Jackson Street jazz to Sub Pop and grunge, its companies from Boeing and UPS to Microsoft, Amazon, Costco and REI, its film and TV connections, and its sports teams. If you want to go deeper on the teams, we also have separate Seattle Seahawks, Seattle Mariners and Seattle Kraken quizzes, plus one on Sleepless in Seattle. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the city, its landmarks, its companies and its teams before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Try our Portland, San Francisco and Washington State quizzes next.
30 of 128 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Seattle is named after a chief of which two Native American peoples?
The Duwamish and Suquamish
Chief Seattle (siʔaɫ) led the Duwamish and Suquamish peoples; settler Doc Maynard pushed to name the town after him, and the Duwamish name survives in the city's river.
Q 02Where did the Denny Party land on November 13, 1851?
Alki Point
The Denny Party landed at Alki Point, in today's West Seattle, on November 13, 1851, after sailing from Portland, and moved across Elliott Bay the following spring.
Q 03What was the name of the schooner that carried the Denny Party to their landing site?
Exact
The schooner Exact sailed from Portland and landed the Denny Party on November 13, 1851, then continued north carrying gold prospectors bound for the Queen Charlotte Islands.
Q 04What did the settlers first call the settlement at present-day Pioneer Square?
Duwamps
The settlers called their Elliott Bay site Duwamps, after the Duwamish people, until Doc Maynard persuaded them to rename the town Seattle in 1853.
Q 05The Chinook word "alki" in New York Alki means roughly what?
By and by, or someday
Alki is Chinook Jargon for by and by or someday, so New York Alki meant New York eventually, Charles Terry's hopeful name for the landing-site settlement.
Q 06Which European explorer was the first to visit the area, in May 1792?
George Vancouver
George Vancouver, charting the coast for the Royal Navy aboard HMS Discovery, entered Puget Sound in May 1792, decades before American settlers arrived.
Q 07Puget Sound is named after whom?
A lieutenant on Vancouver's expedition
Vancouver originally applied the name only to the waters south of the Tacoma Narrows.
Q 08Which nickname officially replaced "Queen City" as Seattle's epithet in 1982?
The Emerald City
The Emerald City won a 1982 contest run by the Seattle-King County Convention and Visitors Bureau, replacing Queen City and nodding to the region's evergreen forests.
Q 09Which Seattle street is the supposed origin of the term "Skid Row"?
Yesler Way
Timber was skidded down the hill to Henry Yesler's sawmill; the area's later dereliction may have given the term its meaning.
Q 10What accidentally started the Great Seattle Fire of 1889?
An overheated glue pot in a carpentry shop
It burned less than a day but took the entire central business district, and the city rebuilt in brick.
Q 11Why does the Seattle Underground exist beneath Pioneer Square?
Streets were raised one to two storeys after the 1889 fire
Pedestrians at first climbed ladders between the new street level and the old sidewalks below.
Q 12Which ship docked in Seattle in July 1897 with its famed "ton of gold"?
S.S. Portland
The steamer Portland tied up on July 17, 1897 carrying more than a ton of Klondike gold, and Seattle made itself the outfitting and supply point for the rush that followed.
Q 13Which 1909 fair largely shaped the layout of the University of Washington campus?
Q 21Where is Boeing's wide-body aircraft plant in the Seattle area?
Everett
Renton builds the narrow-body jets; Paine Field in Everett opened as a passenger airport in 2019.
Q 22Where did the first Starbucks open on March 30, 1971?
Pike Place Market
The first Starbucks opened at 2000 Western Avenue beside Pike Place Market in 1971, selling whole beans rather than drinks, and moved a block to its longtime Pike Place storefront in 1976.
Q 23From which city did Microsoft move to the Seattle suburbs in 1979?
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Bill Gates and Paul Allen had founded it in 1975 to sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800; it is now in Redmond.
The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition
The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909 was built on the University of Washington grounds to an Olmsted Brothers plan, whose Rainier Vista axis became the campus's central spine.
Q 14Which delivery giant was founded in Seattle in 1907 with a $100 loan?
UPS
UPS began as the American Messenger Company, started in 1907 by nineteen-year-old James E. Casey with $100 borrowed from a friend; it took the United Parcel Service name in 1919.
Q 15What early labour milestone did Seattle see in 1919?
A general strike
The Seattle General Strike of February 1919 was the first citywide general strike in the United States; some 65,000 workers walked out for five days after a shipyard wage dispute.
Q 16Who became the first female mayor of a major American city, in Seattle in 1926?
Bertha Knight Landes
Bertha Knight Landes, a former city council president, was elected mayor of Seattle in 1926 and served one two-year term before losing her 1928 re-election bid.
Q 17Which world's fair was held in Seattle in 1962?
Century 21 Exposition
The Century 21 Exposition ran from April 21 to October 21, 1962, drew nearly 10 million visitors, and, unusually for a world's fair of its era, turned a profit.
Q 18What did a famous early-1970s billboard ask the last person leaving Seattle to do?
Turn out the lights
The April 1971 billboard read 'Will the last person leaving Seattle — Turn out the lights'; the Boeing Bust, after the SST cancellation and a slump in airliner orders, had halved the company's local workforce.
Q 19In which year did Boeing move its headquarters from Seattle to Chicago?
2001
Boeing announced the move in March 2001 and opened its Chicago headquarters that September, later relocating the head office again to Arlington, Virginia, in 2022.
Q 20Who founded the aircraft company that bears his name in Seattle in 1916?
William E. Boeing
William E. Boeing, a timber businessman and pilot, incorporated Pacific Aero Products Co. in Seattle in July 1916; it was renamed Boeing Airplane Company the following year.
Q 24In which Seattle suburb did Jeff Bezos found Amazon in 1994?
Bellevue
Bezos launched Amazon from the garage of a rented house in Bellevue in July 1994, and the site sold its first book online in July 1995.
Q 25Amazon's move to which neighbourhood set off a historic construction boom?
South Lake Union
Amazon began moving into South Lake Union in 2010, and the neighbourhood's former warehouses and car lots filled with office towers and thousands of new apartments over the following decade.
Q 26Where is Costco's worldwide headquarters?
Issaquah
Costco moved its headquarters to Issaquah in 1996; its Kirkland Signature label keeps the name of its previous home, another Eastside suburb.
Q 27What did Nordstrom sell exclusively when it opened in 1901?
Shoes
Wallin & Nordstrom opened in downtown Seattle in 1901 as a shoe shop, and the company sold nothing but shoes until it bought the Best Apparel clothing chain in 1963.
Q 28How is the outdoor retailer REI, founded by Lloyd and Mary Anderson, structured?
As a consumers' co-operative
REI is a consumers' co-operative founded in 1938 by Lloyd and Mary Anderson with 21 fellow Seattle mountaineers; members pay a one-time fee and elect its board of directors.
Q 29Which airline is headquartered in the city of SeaTac?
Alaska Airlines
Alaska Airlines keeps its headquarters on International Boulevard in SeaTac, a short drive from the terminal; it began in 1932 as McGee Airways in Anchorage.
Q 30The city of SeaTac took its name from what?
The airport's nickname
The city, incorporated in 1990, took the airport's nickname Sea-Tac, short for Seattle-Tacoma International, which the Port of Seattle operates about 14 miles south of downtown.