Shoe Trivia
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108 free Shoe trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
64 free shoe trivia questions with answers. Everybody wears them and almost nobody knows where they came from. This quiz covers footwear from the 5,500-year-old shoe found in an Armenian cave to the $28 million ruby slippers, taking in Persian cavalry heels, Louis XIII's red heels, the sabot that supposedly gave us 'sabotage', foot binding, the barleycorn behind your shoe size, and the brand stories of Nike, Adidas, Puma, Converse, Dr. Martens, Birkenstock and Crocs. It starts easy (why sneakers are called sneakers, what a wellington is named after) and works up to the details sneakerheads and fashion historians argue over: how much Nike paid for the swoosh, which Pantone shade Louboutin owns, what size Robert Wadlow wore, and how many pairs Imelda Marcos really left behind. Free to use for a fashion quiz, a shoe-store event or a pub round. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on footwear history, sizing and the brands themselves, and each question carries its source. No recycled listicle errors.
30 of 108 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The world's oldest known leather shoe, about 5,500 years old, was found in 2008 in which country?
Armenia
Armenia's Areni-1 cave kept the one-piece cowhide shoe almost perfect under a thick seal of sheep dung; it was stuffed with grass, either to warm the foot or to hold the shoe's shape.
Q 02The earliest known footwear, 10,000-year-old sagebrush-bark sandals, was found in a cave in which US state?
Oregon
Oregon's Fort Rock Cave gave up the sandals in 1938, sealed beneath ash from the eruption that formed Crater Lake about 7,600 years ago; radiocarbon dating later showed them to be far older than the ash itself.
Q 03Ötzi the Iceman's shoes from around 3300 BC had soles made from the skin of which animal?
Bear
Bear hide formed the soles, worn fur side in, while a net of bark string held dry grass around the foot like a sock; modern replicas have proved comfortable over long distances.
Q 04UK and US shoe sizes rise in steps of a third of an inch, a unit named after which grain?
Barley
Barley: the barleycorn goes back to medieval English law, which built the inch from three dry, round grains of it, and each full shoe size is still one barleycorn longer than the last.
Q 05What is the sliding metal foot-measuring tool found in shoe shops called, after the man who invented it?
The Brannock Device
The Brannock Device is named after Charles Brannock, who designed it in the 1920s while working in his father's shoe shop in Syracuse, New York, to replace the plain wooden size-stick.
Q 06Whose US size 37 feet are the largest ever recorded?
Robert Wadlow
Robert Wadlow, the tallest person ever measured at 8 ft 11.1 in, took a US size 37AA, about 18.5 inches long, and the International Shoe Company made his pairs free while he toured for it.
Q 07The 10th-century cavalry of which empire wore heeled boots to keep their feet in the stirrups?
Persian
Emissaries of Abbas the Great brought the fashion to Europe in the early 17th century, and men wore them first.
Q 08Which French king ruled that only he and the members of his court could wear red heels?
Louis XIV
Louis XIV kept red heels for himself and his courtiers, which turned them into a badge of royal favour, and he shows off his own pair in Hyacinthe Rigaud's famous 1701 state portrait.
Q 09In 1860s America, a 'well heeled' gamecock was one fitted with what?
Spurs
Spurs: a heeled bird was an armed one, and the word seems to have passed to men carrying revolvers and, by 1880, to men with money, so well-heeled may owe nothing to shoes.
Q 10The 15th-century pointed shoe called the Crakow is thought to be named after a city in which country?
Poland
Kraków was then the Polish capital.
Q 11The tiny embroidered shoes worn on bound feet in imperial China were named after which flower?
Lotus
Lotus: the bound foot itself was called a lotus, the ideal being only about three inches long, and a girl whose feet stayed much larger could struggle to find a husband.
Q 12What did China's new Manchu emperors do about foot binding in the 1600s?
Banned it
They banned it, but so few Han families obeyed that the Kangxi Emperor gave up in 1668; the custom outlasted the dynasty and was outlawed again by the new republic in 1912.
Q 13The word 'sabotage' comes from the French sabot, which is what kind of footwear?
A wooden clog
A wooden clog: French saboter meant to clatter about in sabots and so to botch a job, and the famous tale of workers hurling their clogs into machinery has no evidence behind it.
Q 21What about Michael Jordan's rookie-year Nikes broke NBA rules?
Their colours
Their colours: the black-and-red pair had too little white to match his team's shoes; the barred pair was really a Nike Air Ship, but Nike's adverts pinned the story on the new Air Jordan I.
Q 22The Air Jordan 'Jumpman' pose was first photographed for Life magazine ahead of which event?
The 1984 Summer Olympics
The 1984 Summer Olympics: Co Rentmeester shot Jordan for Life's preview issue, and the leap was no dunk but a ballet-style jump from a standing start, made in New Balance shoes rather than Nikes.
Q 23In 2008 an Iraqi journalist threw both of his shoes at which visiting leader during a Baghdad press conference?
Q 14Why were rubber athletic shoes nicknamed 'sneakers'?
The soles let the wearer creep up quietly
The soles let the wearer creep up quietly: prison inmates had already coined 'sneaks' over the rubber-soled shoes their warders wore, and 'sneakers' was in American print by the 1890s.
Q 15British plimsolls got their name because the rubber strip above the sole resembled a line painted on what?
A ship's hull
A ship's hull: the Plimsoll line, won by MP Samuel Plimsoll's fight against overloaded 'coffin ships', shows how low a vessel may safely sit, and water above the shoe's strip likewise meant wet feet.
Q 16How did Ethiopia's Abebe Bikila run the 1960 Olympic marathon in Rome, which he won in world-record time?
Barefoot
Barefoot: the new shoes he bought in Rome gave him blisters, so he ran without any and broke the world record, then won again in Tokyo four years later wearing shoes.
Q 17In 2011 Nike auctioned 1,500 replicas of the glowing high-top sneakers worn by which film character?
Marty McFly
Marty McFly wears them in Back to the Future Part II; the ten-day eBay auction raised $4.7 million for Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's foundation, a sum then doubled by a matching grant.
Q 18How much did Nike pay Carolyn Davidson for designing the Swoosh in 1971?
$35
$35 was her invoice for the 17.5 hours she billed, and Phil Knight told her he didn't love the logo; in 1983 Nike thanked her with a Swoosh-shaped ring and 500 shares of stock.
Q 19What was Nike originally called when Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman founded it in 1964?
Blue Ribbon Sports
Blue Ribbon Sports began by importing Japanese running shoes, which Knight sold at track meets from the back of his car; the name Nike arrived in 1971, suggested by the firm's first employee, Jeff Johnson.
Q 20Which kitchen appliance did Bill Bowerman use in 1971 to create a new grippy sole for track shoes?
A waffle iron
A waffle iron: over breakfast with his wife Barbara he saw its grid as a tread that could grip his university's new artificial track without spikes, then ruined her iron by pouring in urethane to test it.
George W. Bush
George W. Bush ducked both and joked that the shoe was a size 10; the protest stung because showing someone the sole of a shoe is a grave insult in Arab culture.
Q 24In 1952 Adidas bought its three stripes from Finland's Karhu for the equivalent of €1,600 and what else?
Two bottles of whiskey
Two bottles of whiskey sealed it: Karhu, whose spikes had just starred at its home Helsinki Olympics, was then the famous name, and the buyer a little-known German newcomer.
Q 25How were the founders of Adidas and Puma, who split their shared shoe firm in 1948 after a feud, related?
Brothers
Brothers: Adi and Rudolf Dassler built rival factories on opposite banks of the river in Herzogenaurach, 'the town of bent necks', where locals checked a stranger's shoes before speaking.
Q 26Which American sprinter did Adi Dassler persuade to wear his handmade spikes at the 1936 Berlin Olympics?
Jesse Owens
Four gold medals later, the Dassler name was known to athletes worldwide.
Q 27At the 1970 World Cup, Puma paid which footballer to delay a kick-off by kneeling to tie his bootlaces on camera?
Pelé
Pelé asked the referee for a moment, knelt, and the cameras closed in on his boots; signing him broke a truce Puma had struck with its great rival to avoid a bidding war over him.
Q 28How did Christian Louboutin colour his first red sole?
With an assistant's red nail polish
With an assistant's red nail polish: she was painting her nails beside him, so he took the bottle and coated a prototype's black sole with it.
Q 29In 2012 a court ruled that Louboutin owns the red sole trademark except when what?
The whole shoe is red
That let Yves Saint Laurent keep selling all-red shoes.
Q 30The number of the classic Dr. Martens 1460 boot refers to what?
Its launch date
Its launch date: the first pair left the Griggs factory in Wollaston, Northamptonshire, on 1 April 1960, or 1/4/60 as the British write it, and the 1461 shoe followed exactly a year later.