Signs and Symbols Trivia
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98 free Signs and Symbols trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 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 98 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 had made the skull and crossbones look like fun, so the Pittsburgh poison centre tried faces on young children and picked the one they liked least.
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; the Container Corporation of America, whose 1970 contest Anderson won, never held a trademark on it, so anyone anywhere may use the symbol.
Q 03Often said to mean 'save our souls', what was SOS really when it became the distress call in 1906?
A distinctive Morse sequence
A distinctive Morse sequence, three dots, three dashes, three dots, was picked because it is easy to send and hard to mistake; the 'save our souls' reading was invented afterwards.
Q 04The European Commission says the two parallel lines through the euro sign stand for what quality?
Stability
Stability is the official reading of the double bar, while the curve around it is a Greek epsilon, chosen to echo the first letter of the word Europe.
Q 05Which Swedish naturalist first used the Mars and Venus symbols to mark male and female flowers, in the 1750s?
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 recalls which medical service that barbers once offered?
Bloodletting
Bloodletting is the trade behind the stripes, red for blood and white for bandages; the pole itself is said to recall the stick a patient squeezed to make the veins stand out.
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 scribe's looped shorthand for 'per cento', a phrase in which language?
Italian
Italian 'per cento', for a hundred, was written so often that it shrank to 'pc' with a small loop; by about 1650 the mark looked like a fraction, and the 'per' then dropped away.
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 stones gave Hara the idea during a lunchtime game; he needed a label for car parts that held far more than the 20 or so characters a barcode could carry.
Q 13Which tech standard's logo binds the runes Hagall and Bjarkan, the initials of a 10th-century Viking king?
Bluetooth
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 is literally 'the sign', an S crossed by a diagonal stroke between two dots; D.S. abbreviates dal segno, 'from the sign', so the player repeats from there.
Q 23The white-and-blue Alpha signal flag warns nearby vessels of what?
A diver below
A diver below means the vessel flying Alpha cannot move from its position, so others must keep well clear at slow speed; North American sport divers more often fly a red flag with a white diagonal stripe.
Bluetooth's logo joins the runes for H and B, for King Harald Bluetooth, who brought separate peoples under one crown much as the standard was meant to unite PCs and phones; the name began as a stopgap codename.
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 was chosen for the poster of the 1949 Paris Peace Congress, and when his daughter was born as the congress opened he named her Paloma, Spanish for dove.
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 wanted a little smile to cheer its staff, and Ball drew one in ten minutes for $45 and never trademarked it.
Q 16The three-crescent symbol a Dow Chemical engineer devised in 1966 to be 'memorable but meaningless' warns of what?
Biohazards
Biohazards got a sign with no earlier meaning on purpose: Charles Baldwin wanted a shape people would remember but could not misread, so that its meaning could be taught from scratch.
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 printed it on blue, chosen because so little blue was used where radioactive work went on; high-visibility yellow later took over.
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 a black symbol on white in every country that adopts the system, which is why Europe retired its own older hazard symbols, a switch completed in 2017.
Q 19On the NFPA 704 hazard square posted at US chemical sites, what does the yellow quadrant rate?
Reactivity
Reactivity is yellow on the right, flammability red on top and health blue on the left, each scored from 0 to 4 so that firefighters can judge what a building holds before they enter.
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.
Q 24The 'Blue Peter', hoisted when a ship is about to leave port, is the signal flag for which letter?
P
P, or Papa, is the letter; the BBC named its children's programme Blue Peter after the flag in 1958, promising young viewers a voyage of adventure.
Q 25In motor racing, what does a black flag with an orange disc 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 26On a 1965 Beatles album cover, the band strike semaphore-style poses meant to spell which word, though they really read NUJV?
HELP
HELP, the album's title, was the plan, but photographer Robert Freeman thought the true arm positions looked wrong and rearranged them for the best shapes, so the British sleeve reads NUJV.
Q 27Pluto'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 28Jérôme 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.
Q 29Urbain Le Verrier proposed which symbol for the planet he had predicted mathematically, falsely claiming official approval for it?
A trident
A trident, the sea god's weapon, was Le Verrier's pick for Neptune; he then sought to have the planet named Le Verrier, after himself, a name astronomers in other countries firmly resisted.
Q 30The star and crescent on Turkey's flag was an emblem of which ancient Greek colony long before the Ottomans captured it?
Byzantium
Byzantium, later Constantinople and now Istanbul, stamped the pair on its coins; legend ties them to a light in the night sky that exposed an attack by Philip of Macedon in 340 BC.