Valentine's Day Trivia for Kids
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46 free Valentine's Day Trivia for Kids trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Valentine's Day trivia for kids should be sweet, silly and easy to run in a classroom: who Cupid is, what the little candy hearts say, why we sign notes XOXO, and which cartoon dog stole a Valentine kiss. These 46 questions start with the basics every kid can get and work up to the surprising history behind the holiday. The set covers Cupid and the Roman and Greek gods of love, roses and lovebirds, Sweethearts candy and heart-shaped chocolate boxes, the very first valentines, Charlie Brown and Lady and the Tramp, and how kids in Finland, Japan, Korea and Brazil celebrate. Every answer is checked against a cited source and each explanation adds one more fact. Use it for a class party, a family dinner game or a rainy afternoon in February. Play a round now and see how many hearts you can collect.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In one famous legend, what did Saint Valentine do in secret against a Roman emperor's orders?
Performed weddings
Performed weddings, the story goes: Emperor Claudius II is said to have banned marriages because he thought single men made better soldiers. It is legend, not recorded history.
Q 02Which winged Roman god, often shown with a bow and arrow, is a symbol of Valentine's Day?
Cupid
Cupid carries two kinds of arrow in Roman myth: a golden one fills its target with love, while a blunt lead one makes the victim want nothing but to run away.
Q 03The Roman god of love is usually described as the son of which goddess?
Venus
Venus grew so jealous of a beautiful mortal named Psyche that she sent her son to make the girl fall for a monster; he fell in love with Psyche himself instead.
Q 04What did the ancient Greeks call their god of love, the model for the Roman one?
Eros
Eros started out as a handsome winged youth in early Greek art; the chubby child on today's Valentine cards only took over in later Greek times.
Q 05The chocolates in a Valentine's box start out as the beans of which plant?
Cacao
Cacao beans were a drink long before they were a sweet: the Maya whipped them into a bitter, frothy brew, and the Aztecs spent the beans as money.
Q 06What do the little heart-shaped Sweethearts candies have printed on them?
Short messages
Short messages such as Be Mine took over from long ones: the first printed candies of the 1860s were bigger, shaped like shells and horseshoes, and carried whole lines of wedding advice.
Q 07Roughly how many Sweethearts candies did the company Necco make every year?
8 billion
About 8 billion a year was Necco's own count, nearly all sold in the six weeks before Valentine's Day; after the company shut in 2018, shops had no Sweethearts at all for Valentine's 2019.
Q 08Which chocolate company is credited with selling the first heart-shaped boxes of Valentine's chocolates?
Cadbury
Cadbury's Richard Cadbury ran sales for the family firm and saw the chance to tie chocolate to romance, selling it in decorated boxes and then heart-shaped ones for Valentine's Day.
Q 09The letters XOXO at the end of a note stand for what?
Hugs and kisses
Hugs and kisses: each X is a kiss and each O a hug. One theory traces the X to the Middle Ages, when people who could not write signed with a cross, but nobody knows for certain.
Q 10Who first sold mass-produced Valentine cards in the United States, starting around 1847?
Esther Howland
Esther Howland made them in Worcester, Massachusetts, from embossed paper lace, and the Greeting Card Association's award for greeting-card visionaries bears her name.
Q 11Valentine's Day is the second-biggest holiday for sending cards in the US, behind which one?
Christmas
Christmas wins by a mile: Americans send well over a billion Christmas cards a year, against roughly 150 million valentines, not counting the packs children swap in class.
Q 12The French duke credited with the oldest surviving valentine spent years as a prisoner of war, including in which building?
The Tower of London
The Tower of London held Charles, Duke of Orléans, after his capture at Agincourt in 1415. He stayed a prisoner for over twenty years; whether he wrote the poem there or back home in France is disputed.
Q 13Valentine's Day in Finland is not mainly about couples; what does its Finnish name, Ystävänpäivä, mean in English?
Q 21Which Greek goddess was closely linked with the rose?
Aphrodite
Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, had the rose as her sacred flower; one myth says its petals turned red when she pricked herself on a thorn.
Q 22An ancient belief put the wedding ring on the fourth finger for what reason?
Its vein led to the heart
Its vein led to the heart, or so people believed from Roman times. The same idea gave the finger its Old English name, the leech finger: 'leech' was an old word for a doctor.
Q 23Hershey's added a paper strip to every Kiss in 1921 to beat what?
Copycats
Copycats sold look-alike chocolate drops, so a new wrapping machine added the branded paper plume; until then every Kiss was wrapped by hand.
Friend's Day
Friend's Day means just what it says: Finns send cards and small gifts to their best friends that day, not only to a sweetheart.
Q 14In Japan, the return-gift day a month after Valentine's Day grew out of a marshmallow promotion and is named after which colour?
White
White Day exists because in Japan it is women who give chocolate on Valentine's Day; the candy industry set March 14 as the men's turn to give something back.
Q 15Which English poet is credited with first linking Valentine's Day to romance, in a 1380s poem about a gathering of birds?
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer set his Parliament of Fowls, a dream of squabbling birds, on Saint Valentine's Day; scholars have found no earlier writing that ties the day to romance.
Q 16Pairs of lovebirds, the small parrots that bond for life, often show affection by doing what?
Feeding each other
Feeding each other is how they do it: one bird passes food straight into its mate's beak, which looks a lot like a kiss. All nine kinds of lovebird come from Africa and Madagascar.
Q 17Which large, long-necked water birds are famous symbols of love because they usually mate for life?
Swans
Swans often choose a partner years before they are old enough to nest, and most pairs then stay together for life.
Q 18Saint Valentine is also a patron saint of which group of workers?
Beekeepers
Beekeepers claim him, and so do people with epilepsy and plague victims; his fame as the saint of sweethearts only took hold many centuries after his death.
Q 19Which ancient Roman festival, with a name thought to come from the Latin for 'wolf', fell in mid-February?
Lupercalia
Lupercalia began at the cave where, legend said, a she-wolf nursed Rome's founders Romulus and Remus. Many historians doubt the festival has any real link to Valentine's Day.
Q 20Which TV show invented Galentine's Day, celebrated the day before Valentine's Day?
Parks and Recreation
Parks and Recreation's Leslie Knope hosts it every February 13 in a 2010 episode: husbands and boyfriends stay home while she treats her female friends to breakfast, and real fans soon copied her.
Q 24In Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown, who does Linus buy chocolates for?
His teacher
His teacher, Miss Othmar, leaves with her boyfriend before he can hand the box over, so a heartbroken Linus throws the chocolates off a bridge. Sally had been sure they were meant for her.
Q 25The famous scene of two dogs kissing over a strand of spaghetti comes from which Disney film?
Lady and the Tramp
Lady and the Tramp serves its spaghetti dinner for two at Tony's restaurant. In 1955 it was the first Disney animated feature made in widescreen CinemaScope, so every scene had to be planned to fill a far wider picture.
Q 26Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is set in which Italian city?
Verona
Verona has a house billed as Juliet's own, and lovelorn visitors from around the world leave notes and letters to her on its walls.
Q 27Who answers the thousands of letters sent to Juliet in her Italian home city each year?
Local volunteers
Local volunteers, known as Juliet's secretaries, read and reply to every letter in her name. The post has been arriving since the 1930s, much of it from people asking for help with their love lives.
Q 28The teddy bear, a classic Valentine gift, is named after which US president?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt, nicknamed Teddy, refused to shoot a bear that had been tied to a tree on a 1902 Mississippi hunt; a cartoon of the scene inspired the toy's name.
Q 29Red as a valentine, which bird is the state bird of seven US states, more than any other?
Northern cardinal
The northern cardinal reminded early European settlers of the Catholic Church's cardinals, who wear red robes and caps, and the name stuck. Only the male is bright red.
Q 30What did the vinegar valentines sold in Victorian shops do?
Insulted the receiver
Insulted the receiver: each carried a rude cartoon and a mocking verse, and was posted without a name. By the mid-1800s they are said to have made up about half of all valentines sold in the United States.