Toilet Trivia
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45 free Toilet trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
48 free toilet trivia questions with answers. The flush toilet was described by Queen Elizabeth's godson in 1596, Thomas Crapper did not invent it, and 827,280 Victorians paid a penny to try one at the Great Exhibition. This toilet trivia quiz covers the whole unglamorous history: Indus Valley sewers, Roman pay toilets, castle garderobes, the S-trap, the 1.6-gallon law, the Australian dual flush and the Japanese Washlet. It also takes in toilet paper (perfumed sheets for a Ming emperor, splinter-free tissue, the 1973 Johnny Carson panic, over versus under), the bidet's horsey name, Duchamp's urinal, the space toilet, the outhouse and World Toilet Day. Easy questions ask which artist signed a urinal 'R. Mutt'; the hard ones want who invented the waterless urinal and where America's first pay toilet stood. It suits a pub quiz novelty round, a plumbing office party or anyone who reads in the bathroom. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia entry, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
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Q 01Which courtier described England's first flushing toilet, which he named the Ajax, in a 1596 book?
Sir John Harington
Sir John Harington described his flushing 'Ajax' in the 1596 book The Metamorphosis of Ajax; its name punned on a slang word for a privy, and its satire got him banished from court.
Q 02The 1596 toilet book The Metamorphosis of Ajax got its author banished from court by which monarch?
Elizabeth I
Elizabeth I was the author's godmother, and she had banished him once before, until he translated the whole of Orlando Furioso as penance for passing a racy canto around her ladies.
Q 03What does the S-shaped bend that a Scottish watchmaker patented for toilets in 1775 keep out of the room?
Sewer gas
Sewer gas is blocked by the plug of water that sits in the bend, a trick Alexander Cumming patented in 1775 and that still works beneath almost every toilet and sink.
Q 04Which Victorian plumber is wrongly credited by legend with inventing the flush toilet, though he did hold nine patents?
Crapper
Crapper held nine patents but did not invent the flush toilet; Wallace Reyburn's tongue-in-cheek 1969 biography Flushed with Pride inflated his fame, and his firm's manhole covers at Westminster Abbey draw tourists.
Q 05Which royal residence of the future Edward VII earned a Chelsea plumber his first royal warrant in the 1880s?
Sandringham House
Sandringham House in Norfolk had been bought for the Prince of Wales in 1862, and the job led on to work at Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey.
Q 06Which Hitchcock thriller is credited as the first Hollywood film to show a toilet being flushed on screen?
Psycho
Psycho alarmed the censors with its shot of torn-up notepaper swirling down the bowl, because American films of the time almost never showed a toilet at all.
Q 07At the 1851 Great Exhibition, 827,280 visitors each paid how much to use George Jennings' 'Monkey Closets'?
One penny
One penny bought a clean seat, a towel, a comb and a shoe shine, and the closets proved so popular that they stayed open after the Exhibition, earning about £1,000 a year.
Q 08Which Roman emperor's tax on collected urine inspired the saying 'money has no smell'?
Vespasian
Vespasian taxed the urine collected from Rome's public latrines and sold to fullers; Suetonius records his retort that the coins did not smell, and French street pissoirs were later named vespasiennes after him.
Q 09Which ancient civilization, in cities like Mohenjo-Daro and Lothal, had the first known urban sanitation systems?
Indus Valley
Indus Valley builders ran covered brick drains along the streets of Mohenjo-Daro to carry waste water from houses, and left openings at intervals so the drains could be inspected and cleaned.
Q 10Which Neolithic village in Orkney, occupied from about 3100 BC, had small rooms over a communal drain?
Skara Brae
Skara Brae, a stone-built Neolithic settlement on Orkney, was buried in sand and re-exposed by a storm in 1850; some of its huts had small cells over a communal drain.
Q 11A medieval castle's toilet was called the garderobe, a word that also gave English the name of which piece of furniture?
Wardrobe
Wardrobe is the same word as garderobe, 'guard the robes'; by one account clothes were hung in the castle privy because the ammonia was thought to keep fleas and moths away.
Q 12Which household vessel was nicknamed the jerry and the guzunder?
Chamber pot
Chamber pot nicknames were many, and guzunder simply records that it 'goes under' the bed, where it spared its owner a night-time walk to the outdoor privy.
Q 13The word 'toilet' comes from toilette, a diminutive of the French toile, which means what?
Cloth
Cloth is toile in French and a toilette was a little one; the word passed from the cloth to the dressing table, to getting dressed, to the dressing room and only then to the fixture.
Q 21Which brothers, credited with first selling toilet paper on a roll, were too embarrassed to put their own name on it?
Scott
Scott brothers Irvin and Clarence of Philadelphia let dealers sell their rolls under some 2,000 other labels, and the family name only went on the wrapper in about 1903.
Q 22For two decades of TV ads, the grocer Mr. Whipple begged shoppers 'Please don't squeeze' which toilet paper?
Charmin
Charmin's fussy grocer, who squeezed the rolls himself when nobody was looking, was played by Dick Wilson in more than 500 commercials, the first of them filmed in Flushing, New York.
Q 23As late as the 1930s, the Northern Tissue company advertised its toilet paper as being free of what?
Splinters
Q 14Which 1858 London event, caused by sewage in the Thames, spurred Parliament to fund Bazalgette's sewers?
The Great Stink
The Great Stink of summer 1858 made the sewage-laden Thames so foul that Parliament, sitting beside it, quickly funded Joseph Bazalgette's interceptor sewer system for London.
Q 15Which president signed the 1992 energy law that capped new American toilets at 1.6 gallons per flush?
George H. W. Bush
George H. W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act days before the 1992 election, and from 1994 it more than halved the 3.5 gallons a typical American toilet had used for every flush.
Q 16The two-button dual-flush toilet was developed in 1980 to save water in which drought-prone country?
Australia
Australia's Caroma developed the two-button cistern with a government grant, and states such as South Australia went on to make dual-flush toilets compulsory in new homes.
Q 17Which Japanese company launched the 'paperless' Washlet toilet seat in 1980?
Toto
Toto was selling to a country with no habit of washing with water, and buyers stayed sceptical until a 1982 television commercial made the Washlet a household name.
Q 18What does the 'Otohime' device fitted in many Japanese women's toilets do?
Plays a flushing sound to mask noise
Plays a flushing sound to mask noise: the Otohime was introduced so users need not flush repeatedly for privacy, saving large volumes of water in public toilets.
Q 19Which bathroom fixture is named after an old word for a pony?
Bidet
Bidet meant a small horse in French, and the low basin took the name because the user straddles it like a rider; English had borrowed the word for the horse in the 1620s.
Q 20The world's first known toilet paper, in the 6th century AD, was used in which country?
China
China: the scholar Yan Zhitui wrote in 589 AD that he would not use paper bearing the classics for toilet purposes, the earliest known reference to toilet paper.
Splinters were sometimes left in early rolls by the way the paper was made, and in the 1930s Northern became the first brand to advertise its tissue as free of them.
Q 24Which talk-show host's 1973 joke about a possible shortage triggered a real run on toilet paper in the US?
Johnny Carson
Johnny Carson's December 1973 Tonight Show monologue riffed on a press release by Wisconsin congressman Harold Froehlich about a possible paper shortage; viewers rushed out and emptied the shelves.
Q 25Which British toilet roll brand began in 1942 as a gentleman's disposable handkerchief sold only at Harrods?
Andrex
Andrex takes its name from St Andrew's Mill in Walthamstow, where it was first made, and its soft tissue slowly saw off the hard, shiny sheets that British bathrooms had known.
Q 26Which British king died in 1760, minutes after going to his close stool?
George II
George II drank his morning chocolate at Kensington Palace and went to his close stool alone; minutes later his valet heard a crash, and the post-mortem found that his aorta had torn.
Q 27Before toilet rolls were cheap, which printed items famously ended up on a nail in rural American outhouses?
Mail-order catalogs
Mail-order catalogs from Sears and Montgomery Ward gave rural families something free to read and then to use, and The Old Farmer's Almanac came with a hole in the corner so it could hang there too.
Q 28Which Australian word means outhouse?
Dunny
Dunny is a clipping of dunnekin, old British slang for a privy, and Australians still speak of the dunny roll and the dunny door.
Q 29Which UN-recognised day falls on 19 November each year?
World Toilet Day
World Toilet Day, 19 November, was started by the World Toilet Organization in 2001 and recognised by a UN General Assembly resolution in 2013 to draw attention to sanitation.
Q 30Which country tabled the UN's 2013 'Sanitation for All' resolution, the first it had ever put forward?
Singapore
Singapore had never tabled a resolution in its 48 years at the UN, and the idea came from Jack Sim, a Singaporean businessman who had campaigned for clean public toilets for more than a decade.