St Pattys Day
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91 free St Pattys Day trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free St Pattys Day trivia questions with answers. St Pattys Day trivia lives in two places on BrainPickle. This page is the shorter set; the main quiz is St. Patrick's Day trivia, with our deepest question pool on the topic and a source behind every answer.
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Q 01Which musical instrument is Ireland's national emblem, stamped on every Irish coin?
Harp
Harp: Ireland registered only left-facing harps as its state emblem, because Guinness had been using a right-facing harp as its trademark since the 1870s.
Q 02In Irish tradition, what is a shillelagh?
A wooden cudgel
A wooden cudgel: cut from blackthorn or oak with a heavy knob, the shillelagh passed as a walking stick, and its name is usually traced to a village whose oak forests supplied the wood.
Q 03St Patrick's Day always falls inside which season of the Christian calendar?
Lent
Lent: Ash Wednesday is never later than 10 March and Easter never earlier than 22 March, so the feast always lands inside the fast, and the day's dispensation let people eat and drink.
Q 04According to legend, what creatures did St. Patrick famously banish from Ireland?
Snakes
Snakes: Ireland never had any to banish, and the earliest text crediting Patrick with driving them out dates only from the late twelfth century, some 700 years after he lived.
Q 05Which colour was traditionally linked with St Patrick before green took over?
Blue
Blue: the Anglo-Irish Order of St Patrick, founded in 1783, took sky blue as its colour, while the United Irishmen adopted green in the 1790s and green won out.
Q 06Which U.S. city staged the first recorded St. Patrick's Day parade, back in 1601?
St. Augustine
St. Augustine: the 1601 parade in Spanish Florida, organised by the colony's Irish vicar Ricardo Artur, predates Boston's 1737 celebration and New York's first parade by more than a century.
Q 07Which solitary fairy of Irish folklore is a shoemaker by trade?
Leprechaun
Leprechaun: folklore makes him a solitary cobbler, usually seen working on a single shoe, and anyone who catches him can demand his hidden treasure in exchange for his release.
Q 08What dish, often served with cabbage, is popular on St. Patrick's Day in the United States?
Corned Beef
Corned beef: it is not a traditional Irish dish, since beef was long too dear in Ireland and bacon was the everyday meat; Irish-Americans paired cheap corned beef with cabbage.
Q 09The Irish word 'seamróg', from which 'shamrock' derives, literally means what?
Young clover
Young clover is all it means, yet Elizabethan English writers thought the Irish ate it, possibly confusing seamróg with seamsóg, the word for wood sorrel.
Q 10Which major US city has dyed its river green for St. Patrick's Day since 1962?
Chicago
Chicago got the idea from workers who were using green dye to trace illegal waste discharges into the river, and saw that the same dye could turn the whole river green for the holiday.
Q 11Besides Ireland, on which Caribbean island is St. Patrick's Day a public holiday?
Montserrat
Montserrat: Irish settlers arrived from St Kitts in the 1600s, and the island's holiday now also honours a slave uprising planned for the day in 1768, which failed.
Q 12In Irish traditional music, the violin is almost always called by what name?
Fiddle
Fiddle: it is the same instrument as the violin, and the records Sligo emigrant Michael Coleman cut in New York in the 1920s sailed home as imports and reshaped how fiddlers in Ireland played.
Q 13Patrick's own account of his life, one of his two surviving writings, has what Latin title?
Confessio
Confessio: written late in his life to answer accusers among his fellow churchmen, it tells how a voice in a dream told the young slave that his ship was ready.
Q 21What traditional Irish ring shows two hands holding a crowned heart?
Claddagh Ring
Claddagh Ring: it is named after a fishing village beside Galway, and legend credits Richard Joyce, said to have learned goldsmithing as a captive in Algiers and brought the design home.
Q 22Which NHL team was known as the St. Patricks and wore green jerseys from 1919 to 1927?
Toronto Maple Leafs
Toronto Maple Leafs: the club played in green as the Toronto St. Patricks from 1919 until Conn Smythe's group bought it in 1927 and renamed it the Maple Leafs.
Q 23Which regiment, raised among New York's Irish, traditionally leads the city's St Patrick's Day parade?
The Fighting 69th
Q 14What does the traditional Irish phrase 'Erin go Bragh' mean?
Ireland forever
Ireland forever: the Irish literally says 'Ireland until the end of time'; rebels used it in the 1790s, and Irish deserters later fought the US Army under a green flag bearing the motto.
Q 15St. Patrick's Day is celebrated in March because it is believed to be the anniversary of what event?
His death
His death: early Christians treated the day a saint died as a 'birthday' into heaven, so feast days mark deaths, and tradition holds that Patrick died on this date.
Q 16Legend says St. Patrick used the three leaves of a shamrock to explain which Christian doctrine to the Irish?
The Holy Trinity
The Holy Trinity story was first written down in 1726, yet coins struck decades earlier already show Patrick holding up a shamrock to a crowd.
Q 17New York's first St Patrick's Day marches, in the 1760s, were held by Irish soldiers serving in which army?
British
British: New York was still a British colony, and Irish soldiers stationed there marched in the 1760s, years before the Declaration of Independence.
Q 18Which Irish dish mashes potatoes together with cabbage or kale?
Colcannon
Colcannon: the name is thought to come from the Irish for 'white-headed cabbage', and it became a staple because potatoes and cabbage were cheap all year round.
Q 19Guinness, the drink most tied to St. Patrick's Day, is which style of beer?
Stout
Stout: the word first meant simply 'strong', as in 'stout porter', and Guinness sold porter for decades before it put the word on a beer in the 1840s.
Q 20Which bouncy Irish dance tune comes in double, single and slip varieties?
Jig
Jig: the dance swept the British Isles in the 16th century and crossed to the Continent, where as the gigue it became the closing movement of the Baroque suite.
The Fighting 69th: the nickname is said to have come from Robert E. Lee, whose army faced the regiment in the Civil War, and it has led the city's marchers since about 1851.
Q 24The 'Paddy' in St Paddy's Day is short for which Irish form of the name Patrick?
Pádraig
Pádraig: its pet form is Paddy, which is why 'St Patty's Day' is a slip: Patty is short for Patricia, not Patrick.
Q 25Tradition holds that St Patrick is buried in which Northern Irish town?
Downpatrick
Downpatrick: a slab of Mourne granite beside its cathedral marks the supposed grave, but the stone was only set there in 1900, some fourteen centuries after he died.
Q 26Irish soda bread rises because bicarbonate of soda reacts with the acid in which ingredient?
Buttermilk
Buttermilk: its lactic acid meets the bicarbonate of soda and gives off carbon dioxide at once, so the loaf needs no yeast and no time to rise.
Q 27Which landmark was among the first two lit green for Tourism Ireland's 'Global Greening' in 2010?
Sydney Opera House
Sydney Opera House: it and Auckland's Sky Tower were the first two landmarks lit for Tourism Ireland's Global Greening in 2010, a campaign that later spread to hundreds of sites worldwide.
Q 28Which Irish dance show began as a seven-minute interval act at the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest?
Riverdance
Riverdance: the interval act grew into a full stage show within a year, and its star Michael Flatley then quit over creative control to launch a rival, Lord of the Dance.
Q 29In the old custom of 'drowning the shamrock', where did the sprig worn all day end up?
In the last drink
In the last drink: the sprig went into the final glass of the night, a toast was drunk, and the shamrock was then fished out and thrown over the left shoulder.
Q 30The orange stripe of the Irish tricolour stands for which community?
Irish Protestants
Irish Protestants: orange recalls William of Orange, green stands for Catholics, and the white between them for a lasting truce, as Thomas Francis Meagher, who first flew the flag in 1848, put it.