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50 free Signs and Symbols trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Every day you read dozens of marks that nobody taught you: the trefoil on a lab door, the loop on a recycling bin, the glyph on a power button, the little fish on a car bumper. Each one was drawn by somebody, for a reason, and the reasons are often stranger than the shapes. This quiz covers warning and hazard signs, currency and maths notation, the emblems of world religions, the peace symbol and the names of punctuation marks, planet glyphs, signal flags and semaphore, music notation and the first emoji. Every question names its subject and explains the answer, so it works as a pub-quiz round, a classroom starter on visual literacy, or a solo test of how well you really know the signs around you.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Mr. Yuk, a green grimacing face, was put on US poison labels because children linked the skull and crossbones to what?
Pirates
Pirates made the skull and crossbones look like fun to children, US poison-control groups feared, so the green, tongue-out Mr. Yuk was adopted for poison labels instead.
Q 02The three chasing arrows of the recycling symbol, drawn by 23-year-old student Gary Anderson, trace what shape?
A Möbius strip
A Möbius strip is what the arrows fold into; Anderson's entry won a 1970 contest run by the Container Corporation of America to mark the first Earth Day.
Q 03Why did the 1906 International Radiotelegraph Convention choose SOS as the distress call?
A distinctive Morse sequence
A distinctive Morse sequence is all it was; 'save our souls' and 'save our ship' were backronyms invented later, after the code had first appeared in German regulations of 1905.
Q 04The two parallel lines through the euro sign, unveiled by the European Commission in 1996, officially signify what?
Stability
Stability is the official reading of the double bar; Arthur Eisenmenger, once the EEC's chief graphic designer, claims he had the idea 25 years before the Commission's unveiling.
Q 05Which Swedish naturalist first used the Mars and Venus symbols to mark male and female flowers, in 1751?
Carl Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus, sorting flowers by their stamens and pistils, was first to press the astronomers' planet signs into service for the sexes, and biology has kept them ever since.
Q 06Susan Kare lifted the ⌘ on Apple's Mac keyboards from a road sign used in Nordic countries to mark what?
Places of interest
Places of interest is what the looped square marks on Nordic roads; Kare found it in a symbol dictionary after Steve Jobs vetoed filling the Mac's menus with Apple logos.
Q 07The two-snake caduceus on US Army medical insignia is, in Greek myth, the staff carried by which god?
Hermes
Hermes, god of trade and messengers, carries the caduceus; its adoption for US Army medical officers in 1902 spread the mix-up with the single-snake rod of Asclepius, medicine's older emblem.
Q 08The red and white barber's pole, with a basin-shaped top, recalls which medical service barbers once offered?
Bloodletting
Bloodletting is the trade behind the stripes: the pole stood for the staff patients gripped to speed blood flow, and the basin held the blood, or the leeches.
Q 09Which engineer chose the @ sign in 1971 to split a user's name from a host in the first networked email?
Ray Tomlinson
Ray Tomlinson of BBN picked the little-used @ key, a mark that had spent centuries as an abbreviation for the arroba, a Spanish weight of about 25 pounds.
Q 10The % sign grew out of a looped scribal shorthand for a phrase in which language meaning 'for a hundred'?
Italian
Italian merchants' 'per cento' shrank to a looped 'pc', which by 1650 had become a horizontal fraction-like mark and then lost the 'per' entirely.
Q 11Gerald Holtom drew the circle-and-lines peace symbol in 1958 for an Aldermaston march by a British campaign for what?
Nuclear disarmament
Nuclear disarmament's initials N and D, as sent by flag semaphore, are superimposed in the design Holtom presented to the Direct Action Committee in February 1958.
Q 12Masahiro Hara, inventor of the QR code at Denso Wave in 1994, modelled its black-and-white squares on which board game?
Go
Go's black and white counters inspired Hara's alternating squares, in a code built for labelling automobile parts.
Q 13The Bluetooth logo binds two runes for a Danish king's initials, taken from which runic alphabet?
Younger Futhark
Q 21The treble clef, which curls around the second line of the staff, is a stylised form of which letter?
G
G is the letter the treble clef grew from, its curl circling the G above middle C; the bass clef is likewise a worn-down F and the alto clef a C.
Q 22In sheet music, 'D.S. al coda' sends the player back to which marking before the jump to the coda?
The segno
The segno, an S crossed by a diagonal stroke with two dots, is where dal segno restarts the passage, until 'To coda' jumps the player forward to the coda.
Q 23Flag semaphore, still taught to Scouts, began in 1866 as a hand-held version of which earlier signalling system?
Optical telegraph
Younger Futhark's Hagall (ᚼ) and Bjarkan (ᛒ) merge into one bind rune, a nod to the 10th-century king whose nickname the wireless standard borrowed.
Q 14Which artist's lithograph of a dove, made after World War II, turned the bird into a secular symbol of peace?
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso's Dove took an image early Christians had used, with the olive branch, and gave it a new life as a peace symbol in the years after the Second World War.
Q 15Harvey Ball drew the yellow smiley face in 1963 to lift morale after a merger at a Worcester firm in what business?
Life insurance
Life insurance was the trade: State Mutual Life Assurance Company wanted a little smile for buttons, desk cards and posters, and Ball, a freelance artist, drew one.
Q 16Charles Baldwin created the three-crescent biohazard symbol in 1966 for the containment products of which company?
Dow
Dow Chemical's Charles Baldwin, an environmental-health engineer, developed the symbol for the firm's containment products, and it was adopted worldwide.
Q 17The radiation trefoil was drawn in 1946 at the Radiation Laboratory of which university, originally in magenta?
Berkeley
Berkeley's Radiation Laboratory staff doodled it out in 1946, and the first signs were magenta on a blue background; the familiar yellow came later.
Q 18Under the UN's Globally Harmonized System, chemical hazard pictograms sit inside a frame of what shape and colour?
A red diamond
A red diamond frames each GHS pictogram on a white ground; a second, more colourful set of pictograms is used for transporting dangerous goods.
Q 19On the NFPA 704 hazard square posted at US chemical sites, what does the yellow quadrant rate?
Reactivity
Reactivity, or instability, is yellow on the right; red on top is flammability, blue on the left is health, and the white box holds special codes, a scheme credited to the Charlotte Fire Department after a 1959 fire.
Q 20The word 'clef', for the sign that opens a musical staff, is simply the French word for what?
Key
Key is the French clef, and the name fits: the sign fixes one reference note on one line, unlocking every other line and space on the staff.
Optical telegraph towers devised by Home Riggs Popham, later improved by Charles Pasley, were the model; the hand-flag version appeared in 1866 and the US Navy still uses it.
Q 24Which letter's maritime signal flag, a white-and-blue swallowtail, tells other vessels 'I have a diver down'?
Alpha
Alpha, or Alfa, flies from diving support vessels that cannot move from their position and warns others to keep clear at slow speed; Oscar means man overboard.
Q 25The 'Blue Peter', hoisted when a ship is about to leave port, is the signal flag for which letter?
P
P, Papa, a blue flag bearing a white square, is flown in harbour to say all persons should report aboard because the vessel is about to proceed to sea.
Q 26Before Tacitus recorded a white flag of surrender in 109 CE, Roman armies gave up by doing what?
Holding shields above their heads
Holding shields above their heads was the Roman signal; the white flag's first recorded use is from China's Eastern Han dynasty, and Tacitus mentions one in 109 CE.
Q 27In motor racing, what does a black flag with an orange disc in its centre tell a driver to do?
Pit for a mechanical problem
Pit for a mechanical problem is the order: the car has serious trouble or loose bodywork that presents a risk to other competitors, so it is summoned in.
Q 28On the UK cover of the Beatles' album Help!, the four semaphore arm poses spell which letters instead of HELP?
NUJV
NUJV is what the UK Parlophone sleeve spells; photographer Robert Freeman found the real letters ugly and rearranged the arms, and the US Capitol sleeve reads NVUJ.
Q 29Pluto's astronomical symbol, announced by its discoverers in 1930, is a monogram of which two letters?
P and L
P and L stand for Pluto but also for Percival Lowell, whose observatory began the search for a planet beyond Neptune that eventually turned up Pluto.
Q 30Jérôme Lalande designed a symbol for Uranus as a globe topped with the initial of which astronomer?
William Herschel
William Herschel, the planet's discoverer, was told by Lalande it was 'a globe surmounted by the first letter of your name', and French almanacs for a time called the planet Herschel.