The Ukulele Trivia
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49 free The Ukulele trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This ukulele trivia quiz covers the small four-stringed instrument from its arrival in Honolulu on a Portuguese immigrant ship in 1879 to its YouTube-fuelled revival. The easy questions are ones any player can answer: how many strings, the GCEA tuning and the jingle used to remember it, the four standard sizes, the Hawaiian wood makers prize, and what the word ukulele roughly means. From there it goes into the history: the three Madeiran cabinet makers credited with building the first ones, the king who put them in royal performances, the 1915 San Francisco exposition that made the uke a mainland craze, and the plastics maker who turned out nine million of them. The second half is people and moments. Cliff 'Ukulele Ike' Edwards, who went on to voice Jiminy Cricket; George Formby and his banjolele; Marilyn Monroe strumming in Some Like It Hot; Tiny Tim's falsetto and his televised wedding; Israel Kamakawiwoʻole's 3 a.m. one-take medley that topped a Billboard chart for 375 weeks; the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain at the Proms; and Jake Shimabukuro's Beatles cover that became one of YouTube's first viral hits. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the ukulele and its makers and players, and each question links to the page that establishes it. Fifty questions, free, with an explanation after every answer.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which four notes are the most common ukulele tuning?
GCEA
GCEA, with a twist: the G is pitched above the C next to it, so all four strings sit within one octave. That 're-entrant' tuning gives the uke its tight, bright chords.
Q 02The immigrants who built the first ukuleles reached Hawaii in 1879 under contract to work in which industry?
Sugar
Sugar. The three future instrument makers were signed on as plantation hands, and only set up as guitar makers in Honolulu once their contracts had run out.
Q 03Which ukulele size is normally tuned DGBE, like the top four strings of a guitar?
Baritone
Baritone. The deepest of the four standard sizes dates only from the 1940s, and because its strings match a guitar's, guitarists can strum it with the chord shapes they already know.
Q 04Which ukulele size came first and is still sometimes just called the 'standard'?
Soprano
Soprano. Makers later stretched it into the larger, louder concert size, and the bigger tenor soon followed.
Q 05What does the word ukulele roughly translate to in Hawaiian?
Jumping flea
Jumping flea, from the Hawaiian words for flea and for leap: perhaps a picture of the player's fingers darting over the strings, though a legend at the royal court tells it differently.
Q 06Which band put a ukulele at the centre of its 2009 hit 'Hey, Soul Sister'?
Train
Train. Singer Pat Monahan thought the song fell flat on guitar until a co-writer picked up a ukulele; 'it made my words dance', he said, and the band's guitarist had to learn the instrument.
Q 07The ukulele descends from small guitars brought to Hawaii by immigrants from where?
Portugal
Portugal. The little four-string guitars its emigrants played in the streets of Honolulu caught on at the royal court, and within a few years Hawaiians had made the instrument their own.
Q 08Which small four-string guitar, also called a braguinha, is the ukulele's closest ancestor?
Machete
Machete. By 1885 two newcomers to Honolulu were advertising home-made machetes in a local newspaper, and within a few years Hawaiians had their own name for the instrument.
Q 09What trade had Nunes, Espírito Santo and Dias learned at home before they built the first ukuleles?
Cabinet makers
Cabinet makers. Building instruments was an old sideline of the trade in Europe, and once free of their first jobs in Hawaii all three set up as guitar makers in Honolulu.
Q 10The three men credited with building the first ukuleles sailed to Hawaii in 1879 from which Atlantic islands?
Madeira
Madeira. They landed in Honolulu from the ship Ravenscrag in August 1879, and within two weeks a local paper reported the newcomers 'delighting the people with nightly street concerts'.
Q 11Which Hawaiian king, the 'Merrie Monarch', is remembered as the ukulele's royal champion?
Kalākaua
Kalākaua was reviving hula in the face of missionary disapproval, and he is said to have made the newly arrived little guitar part of it, playing it himself and featuring it at court.
Q 12Which Hawaiian wood is traditionally preferred for ukuleles?
Koa
Koa grows nowhere but Hawaii, where it was already the wood of outrigger canoes; by 1898 one of the first makers was advertising instruments 'made of Hawaiian wood'.
Q 13Which company invented the oval-bodied 'pineapple' ukulele?
Kamaka
Kamaka. Samuel Kamaka built the oval body in the 1920s; friends are said to have joked that it looked like a pineapple, so an artist among them painted one on the front.
Q 21Cliff 'Ukulele Ike' Edwards later became famous as the voice of which Disney character?
Jiminy Cricket
Jiminy Cricket. Edwards, a household name in 1920s vaudeville as Ukulele Ike, sang 'When You Wish Upon a Star' for the 1940 film Pinocchio, and it won the Oscar for best song.
Q 22After World War II Mario Maccaferri sold millions of cheap ukuleles made of which material?
Plastic
Plastic. When a television star plugged Maccaferri's moulded Islander on air, its sales exploded, and wooden ukuleles started selling faster too.
Q 23Which 1950s TV host set off a ukulele boom by strumming one on his shows?
Arthur Godfrey
Arthur Godfrey was famous for plugging only products he used himself, so when he played and endorsed ukuleles on his CBS shows they sold in the millions.
Q 14What were ukulele strings originally made of?
Catgut
Catgut, which despite the name is cord made from the intestines of sheep and other livestock. Most ukulele strings today are nylon or fluorocarbon instead.
Q 15Which other instrument did Hawaiian musicians bring into American popular music alongside the ukulele?
The steel guitar
The steel guitar, laid flat and played with a sliding bar. Hawaiian troupes took it through mainland vaudeville and world's fairs with the ukulele, and it later became a fixture of country music.
Q 16George Formby's trademark instrument crossed the ukulele with which other instrument?
Banjo
Banjo. Formby was struggling on the music-hall stage until he worked a ukulele into his act, and the banjo-bodied kind became his trademark through his films of the 1930s and 1940s.
Q 17Which Pacific island's ukulele is carved from a single block of wood and strung with fishing line?
Tahiti
Tahiti. Its ukulele has no hollow sound box, only an opening at the back, and players strum its eight fishing-line strings much faster than a Hawaiian uke for a higher, thinner sound.
Q 18The 1915 world's fair credited with setting off America's ukulele craze was held in which city?
San Francisco
San Francisco. Crowds at the Hawaiian Pavilion sent Tin Pan Alley rushing to write Hawaiian-themed songs, though the ukulele was already selling well on the West Coast before the fair opened.
Q 19The ukulele became an icon of which era, when sheet music began printing its chords?
The Jazz Age
The Jazz Age. A crooner with a ukulele is the stock picture of those years, and arranger May Singhi Breen persuaded publishers to print uke chords on almost every popular song sheet.
Q 20Cliff 'Ukulele Ike' Edwards made some of the earliest recordings of which vocal style in 1922?
Scat singing
Scat singing. Edwards called his version 'eefin', a wordless solo that sounded like a kazoo; other singers copied it, and four years later Louis Armstrong made the style famous.
Q 24Marilyn Monroe played a ukulele in which 1959 film?
Some Like It Hot
Some Like It Hot. Monroe plays the singer and ukulele player of an all-girl band, which two musicians on the run from gangsters join disguised as women.
Q 25Tiny Tim's 1968 ukulele hit was a cover of which song?
Tiptoe Through the Tulips
Tiptoe Through the Tulips was a 1929 song made popular by crooning guitarist Nick Lucas. Tiny Tim's quavering falsetto turned it into a novelty hit all over again almost forty years later.
Q 26Tiny Tim reached a national audience in 1968 when he pulled his ukulele from a shopping bag on which TV comedy show?
Laugh-In
Laugh-In. He sang 'A-Tisket, A-Tasket' in his falsetto on the show's first regular broadcast, became a frequent guest, and was back beside John Wayne for its hundredth episode.
Q 27On which television programme did Tiny Tim marry 'Miss Vicki' in December 1969?
The Tonight Show
The Tonight Show. Johnny Carson's programme staged the ceremony on air, NBC put the audience at more than 30 million, and the tape is one of the few from those years that was kept.
Q 28By 1946 George Formby had strummed his ukulele for an estimated three million members of which audience?
Servicemen and women
Servicemen and women. Formby spent the war touring with the forces' entertainment service, ENSA, and was awarded the OBE for it.
Q 29Which Beatle, a Formby fan, gave ukuleles to friends and taught Tom Petty to play?
George Harrison
George Harrison turned up at Tom Petty's house, taught him the chords and, on leaving, opened a car trunk full of ukuleles and left four more, 'because everyone doesn't carry one around'.
Q 30Teacher J. Chalmers Doane made the ukulele a classroom instrument across which country from the 1960s?
Canada
Canada. As music supervisor for the schools of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Doane handed out inexpensive ukuleles to teach children to read music, and at its peak about 50,000 people were learning his way.