Spanish Language Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
111 free Spanish Language trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
61 free Spanish language trivia questions with answers. Spanish is spoken by more than half a billion people, and this quiz digs into how it got that way. Forty-six questions cover the language's birth from Vulgar Latin in Castile, its spread across the Americas, the Philippines and Africa, the Royal Spanish Academy and its motto, the letter ñ, the upside-down question mark, and the thousands of words borrowed from Arabic, Nahuatl, Quechua and Taíno. Easy questions ask which country has the most speakers and which extra letter the alphabet has; harder ones test voseo, yeísmo, the 1754 orthography, the Glosas Emilianenses and why Latin f became a silent h. It suits Spanish students, teachers, language lovers and anyone who has wondered why Argentines say vos. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Spanish language, its academies and its history, and each question shows the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 111 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which English animal name comes from a Spanish phrase meaning 'the lizard'?
Alligator
Alligator is a corruption of el lagarto: English speakers fused the Spanish article el onto the noun, turning 'the lizard' into a single word.
Q 02The Spanish word 'embarazada' famously means what, not 'embarrassed'?
Pregnant
Pregnant is what embarazada means, though English 'embarrass' may descend, via French, from the very same Spanish verb, embarazar.
Q 03Which country has the most native Spanish speakers?
Mexico
Mexico has about 130 million native speakers, yet a 2003 law made Spanish just one of its national languages, with the same validity as its Indigenous languages.
Q 04Which American cowboy word is an anglicized form of the Spanish 'vaquero'?
Buckaroo
Buckaroo comes from vaquero, itself from vaca, 'cow', and English speakers probably bent its spelling toward the familiar word 'buck'.
Q 05Which US state's name comes from the Spanish word for 'snowy'?
Nevada
Nevada means 'snowy' in Spanish, a nod to its snow-capped mountains, yet it is the driest state in the nation.
Q 06Which is the only Spanish-speaking country located entirely in Africa?
Equatorial Guinea
Equatorial Guinea speaks Spanish from its colonial past, yet French, one of its other official languages, is little known locally.
Q 07What letter does the Spanish alphabet have that English lacks?
ñ
Ñ has its own key on Spanish keyboards, and Spain has fought efforts to let computers be sold there without it.
Q 08In Spanish, which letter is pronounced exactly like b?
V
V and b once stood for different sounds, but the two merged, and in modern Spanish both are pronounced as b.
Q 09What punctuation does Spanish put at the START of an interrogative sentence?
An inverted query mark
The Royal Spanish Academy first recommended ¿ and ¡ in its 1754 orthography.
Q 10Which Spanish word comes from the Latin for 'the sixth hour', counted from dawn?
Siesta
Siesta goes back to sexta hora, the noon hour, when people in hot countries have long rested through the heat.
Q 11What is the motto of the Royal Spanish Academy?
Limpia, fija y da esplendor
Its emblem is a crucible on a fire, purifying the language like metal.
Q 12Which Spanish word comes from the Arabic for 'the judge'?
Alcalde
Alcalde comes from al-qadi, and fittingly alcaldes long acted as town judges as well as mayors.
Q 13The Spanish interjection 'ojalá' ('let's hope') comes from an Arabic phrase meaning what?
May Allah want
Everyday words like almohada (pillow), aceite (oil) and azúcar (sugar) are Arabic loans too.
Q 21In which city was the written standard of Spanish first developed in the 13th century?
Toledo
Toledo's translators under Alfonso X stopped using Latin as their target language and put Arabic and Latin works into Spanish instead.
Q 22In most of Spain, how is the letter z (and c before e or i) pronounced?
Like the 'th' in 'thing'
Like the 'th' in 'thing' is heard in northern and central Spain, while Latin Americans use an s sound, so casa (house) and caza (hunt) sound alike there.
Q 23In which country is voseo, saying vos instead of tú, the everyday standard?
Argentina
Argentina uses vos in everyday speech, a pronoun that lost currency in Spain but survived across much of Latin America.
Q 14The Spanish words tomate, chocolate and aguacate come from which indigenous language?
Nahuatl
Nahuatl, the Aztecs' language, named foods the Spanish had never seen, and English then took tomato, chocolate and avocado from Spanish.
Q 15'Hurricane', 'hammock' and 'canoe' reached Spanish and English from which Caribbean language?
Taíno
Taíno words reached Europe with Columbus, who himself used its word canoa, which gave English canoe.
Q 16Which Andean language gave Spanish the words cóndor, puma, llama and pampa?
Quechua
Quechua was the main language of the Incas, and condor, puma and llama traveled on from Spanish into English.
Q 17Which scholar wrote the first grammar of the Spanish language, published in 1492?
Antonio de Nebrija
Antonio de Nebrija later fell under Grand Inquisitor Diego de Deza's suspicion for studying the Bible from its original texts.
Q 18Spanish is often nicknamed 'the language of' which writer?
Cervantes
Cervantes was seized by corsairs while sailing home to Spain and spent five years as a captive in Algiers before being ransomed.
Q 19Which English word began as Spanish for 'little war', during Spain's fight against Napoleon's armies?
Guerrilla
Guerrilla, the diminutive of guerra, named bands of Spanish peasants harrying the occupying French, and English soon used it for any irregular fighter.
Q 20The oldest surviving epic poem in Spanish tells the deeds of which hero?
El Cid
El Cid was the real knight Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, and the poem begins with his king sending him into exile.
Q 24Which pronoun do Spaniards use for the informal plural 'you', that Latin Americans replace with ustedes?
Vosotros
In all of Hispanic America and the Canary Islands, ustedes serves as both formal and informal plural.
Q 25Which Spanish body part ending in -o is feminine?
Mano
Mano keeps the feminine gender of Latin manus, so Spanish says la mano despite the -o ending.
Q 26Which of these dialect features, the merger of ll and y, is called yeísmo?
Pronouncing them the same
Most dialects have merged them; the old 'lli as in million' sound survives mainly in rural northern Spain and the Andes.
Q 27Spanish explorers named Florida partly for 'Pascua Florida', their name for which festival season?
Easter
Easter was the season when Ponce de León landed, and 'florida', from Latin floridus, 'in bloom', also fit the lush coast.
Q 28Spanish is co-official with English in which US territory?
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico's second official language, English, has seen its status swing back and forth with whichever party holds power.
Q 29Which Portuguese-speaking country passed a law obliging its secondary schools to offer Spanish classes?
Brazil
Brazil's 2005 law obliged secondary schools to offer Spanish, but the requirement was scrapped little more than a decade later.
Q 30In which Asian country was Spanish an official language for more than three centuries?
The Philippines
The Philippines removed Spanish as an official language in 1973, but a presidential decree that same year kept it official while old government records stayed untranslated.