Spelling Trivia
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91 free Spelling trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
40 free Spelling trivia questions with answers. Spelling trivia for teachers, quiz nights and anyone who has ever hesitated over 'definitely'. The quiz mixes three things: the history of spelling bees (why a bee is a bee, the boy who won the first national bee with 'gladiolus', the year eight champions shared the trophy), the quirks of English spelling itself (ghoti, ough, the i-before-e rule and its embarrassing exceptions, the Great Vowel Shift, Noah Webster's color and center) and straight spelling tests on the words people actually get wrong most often - accommodate, occurrence, minuscule, supersede and, fittingly, misspell. About a third of the questions are easy enough for a classroom; the later ones - the 1855 letter that first coined ghoti, the 1932 study that measured how bad the i-before-e rule really is, the 45-letter lung disease invented as a hoax - will stretch a champion speller. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question shows its citation.
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Q 01Which flower, whose name is Latin for 'little sword', did Frank Neuhauser spell to win the first National Spelling Bee in 1925?
Gladiolus
Gladiolus: the plant was named for its sword-shaped leaves, from Latin gladius, 'sword', the same root that gives us 'gladiator'.
Q 02If the national spelling bee's finals run out of air time, what settles them?
Speed round
Speed round: in the spell-off, each remaining speller gets a set time to spell as many words as possible, after the bee dropped its written tiebreaker test.
Q 03Zaila Avant-garde, who won the 2021 national spelling bee, also holds Guinness records in which sport?
Basketball
Basketball: she has called spelling 'a side thing' and 'a little hors d'oeuvre', with basketball 'the main dish'.
Q 04The nonsense word 'supercalifragilisticexpialidocious' is used to mean what?
Wonderful
Wonderful: the writers of a 1949 song with a similar word sued Disney's music publisher for copyright infringement, and lost.
Q 05Under Scripps rules, a speller must be under 15 and must not have gone beyond which year of school?
Eighth grade
Eighth grade: since 2013 the bee has also asked vocabulary questions, partly so it wouldn't be seen as a test of memorization alone.
Q 06Which 2006 Keke Palmer film is about a South Los Angeles girl in the National Spelling Bee?
Akeelah and the Bee
Akeelah and the Bee: writer-director Doug Atchison got the idea watching the 1994 bee on TV and noticing that most spellers came from well-off backgrounds.
Q 07In the New York Times Spelling Bee game, which letter must every word you make include?
The center letter
The center letter: after 2,499 puzzles without one, editors finally put an S on the board for the 2,500th, in March 2025.
Q 08Which organization held what it called the first countrywide US spelling bee, in Cleveland in 1908?
The National Education Association
The National Education Association: the winner, Marie Bolden, was a Black girl from Cleveland, and her victory caused a scandal in New Orleans.
Q 09The made-up word 'ghoti' is meant to be pronounced like which English word?
Fish
Fish: 'gh' as in tough, 'o' as in women and 'ti' as in nation, a joke long used to show how unreliable English spelling is.
Q 10The spelling joke 'ghoti' is often credited to which writer, though it isn't in his writings?
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw backed spelling reform, but the earliest known 'ghoti' is in an 1855 letter from the publisher Charles Ollier, a year before Shaw was born.
Q 11English spellings still mostly show how words sounded before which change, underway from the 1400s?
The Great Vowel Shift
The Great Vowel Shift: from about the 15th to the 18th century the long vowels moved, so the 'a' in 'name' changed sound while its spelling stayed put.
Q 12Noah Webster popularised American spellings such as color and center by doing what?
Choosing already existing variants
Critics point out he did not originate them; his 1828 dictionary listed 70,000 words, 12,000 never before in a dictionary.
Q 13At a 1992 school spelling bee, Vice President Dan Quayle wrongly 'corrected' a student's spelling of which word?
Potato
Q 21Which is the correct spelling of the thousand-year period?
Millennium
Millennium: two l's from Latin mille, 'thousand', and two n's from annus, 'year', the root of 'annual'.
Q 22Which is the correct spelling of the word for a go-between?
Liaison
Liaison: it came from French, from Latin ligare, 'to bind', so a liaison is literally a tie between two people or groups.
Q 23Which is the correct spelling of the word meaning 'to make someone feel awkward'?
Embarrass
Embarrass: two r's and two s's; it came from French embarrasser, 'to block', from an Italian word for barring someone's way.
Potato: trusting a cue card that said 'potatoe', Quayle had 12-year-old William Figueroa add an 'e' to his correct spelling.
Q 14Which of these words obeys the 'i before e except after c' rule?
Receive
Receive follows the rule, yet a 2009 British government spelling guide said 'i before e except after c' is not worth teaching.
Q 15Which is the correct spelling of the word meaning 'without doubt'?
Definitely
Definitely: it comes from Latin definitus, 'defined', which is why the word ends in -ite, like 'definite' and 'finite', not -ate.
Q 16Which is the correct spelling of the word meaning 'to provide lodging'?
Accommodate
Accommodate: its double c and double m come from Latin accommodare, 'to make fit', built from ad- plus commodus, 'suitable'.
Q 17Which is the correct spelling of the word meaning 'to keep apart'?
Separate
Separate: from Latin separare, se- 'apart' plus parare 'prepare', which is why the middle is -par-; there's also 'a rat' in it.
Q 18Which is the correct spelling of the word meaning 'very small'?
Minuscule
Minuscule: from Latin minusculus, 'rather small', a diminutive of minus, 'less', which is why it starts minu-, not mini-.
Q 19Which is the correct spelling of the word meaning 'to replace'?
Supersede
Supersede: it comes from Latin supersedere, 'to sit above', so it keeps the -sede of 'sedentary' rather than the -cede of 'precede'.
Q 20Which is the correct spelling of the word meaning 'an instance of something happening'?
Occurrence
Occurrence: its double c and double r come from Latin occurrere, ob- 'toward' plus currere 'to run', the root of 'current'.
Q 24The silent 'd' in 'Wednesday' comes from the name of which god?
Odin
Odin: Old English wodnesdæg meant 'Woden's day', and Woden was the English form of the god the Norse called Odin.
Q 25In 1906, which US president ordered government printers to use simplified spellings such as 'thru'?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt: after the press mocked it and the House voted for standard spelling in government documents, he let the old style return.
Q 26The Welsh village Llanfairpwllgwyngyll is said to have lengthened its name for what purpose?
To attract visitors
To attract visitors: the full name now appears on a sign at the village's railway station, one of the sights tourists come to see.
Q 27What does the long word 'floccinaucinihilipilification' mean?
Judging something worthless
Judging something worthless: it strings together four Latin words, flocci, nauci, nihili and pili, that all mean 'of little or no value'.
Q 28The silent 's' in 'island' was added by wrongly linking it to which unrelated word?
Isle
Isle: the native Old English word was iegland, but from the 1500s writers borrowed the s of the French-derived 'isle', though the two words are unrelated.
Q 29Saying 'blushing crow' for 'crushing blow' is named after which Oxford clergyman?
William Spooner
William Spooner, warden of New College, Oxford, from 1903 to 1924, was reputed to muddle the sounds of his words in just this way.
Q 30The full chemical name of the protein titin runs to roughly how many letters?
189,800
189,800: the name strings together titin's amino acids, and dictionary makers treat such chemical names as verbal formulas, not English words.