Wool Trivia
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60 free Wool trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This wool trivia quiz covers the animal fibre that dressed Europe long before cotton or silk arrived. The easy questions handle the basics: which animals give us cashmere, mohair, angora and qiviut, what lanolin is, and why wool felts when you agitate it. From there it moves into the trade that built medieval England, Flanders and Florence, the Spanish Merino monopoly that carried the death penalty, and the seat in the House of Lords that is still a sack of wool. The harder end is for spinners, knitters and pub-quiz regulars: micron counts and the Super S system, the Woolmark logo's mysterious designer, why Harris Tweed's Orb mark went to every island in the Outer Hebrides, and the runaway sheep whose fleeces set world records. There are also questions on felting history, the Golden Fleece myth, the Aran jumper's invented folklore and the fastest shearing competitions on earth. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on wool, the major fibre types and the events and people involved before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, our sheep, fashion and Scotland quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Wool consists mainly of which structural protein, also found in human hair and nails?
Keratin
Keratin owes its toughness to sulfur: its cysteine units link into disulfide bridges that lock the protein chains together, and the fibre will not dissolve even in hot water.
Q 02What does wool do as it absorbs moisture from damp air?
Gives off heat
Gives off heat: wool produces warmth as it takes up moisture, so a wool jersey worn from a warm room into a cold, damp night warms its wearer instead of chilling them.
Q 03The grease washed out of a raw fleece ends up as the base of which products?
Skin creams
Skin creams: the grease is spun out of the wash water by centrifuge, then refined and bleached until it is pure enough for ointments and cosmetics.
Q 04Which knitted wool garment is named after the earl who led the Charge of the Light Brigade?
Cardigan
Cardigan: the garment copies the knitted wool waistcoat British officers are said to have worn in the Crimean War, and the earl's fame after the 1854 charge made it a fashion.
Q 05The 'Super' number on a wool suit label grades what?
Fibre fineness
Fibre fineness: the higher the number, the finer the wool, and finer fibres leave fewer coarse ends poking out of the yarn, which is why a high Super number feels less prickly.
Q 06Which form of anthrax, caught from contaminated fleeces, took its common name from a textile-trade job?
Woolsorters' disease
Woolsorters' disease is the lung form of anthrax, not the skin form: sorters caught it by breathing in spores shaken loose from contaminated fleeces.
Q 07Which type of wool yarn is strong, long-staple and combed, giving a smooth hard surface used in suiting?
Worsted
Worsted is named after Worstead, the Norfolk village where the cloth was first made; woollen yarn, by contrast, is carded rather than combed, which leaves it soft and fuzzy.
Q 08Recycled wool made by tearing apart existing fabric and respinning it is traditionally called what?
Shoddy
Shoddy looked like good broadcloth when new but soon wore shabby, and after it clothed American Civil War armies its name became the everyday word for anything cheaply made.
Q 09The presiding officer of the House of Lords sits on a wool-stuffed seat known as what?
The Woolsack
Edward III ordered his Lord Chancellor to sit on a wool bale to symbolise how central the wool trade was to England's medieval economy.
Q 10Before its 1938 refill with wool, the Lord Chancellor's seat in the Lords had been stuffed with what?
Horsehair
Horsehair had replaced the original filling over the years, so the seat that honours England's wool wealth was re-stuffed with wool given by the International Wool Secretariat.
Q 11Smuggling sheep and wool out of England by night, which could once cost a man a hand, was known as what?
Owling
Owling probably takes its name from the owl's nocturnal habits; under a 1566 law, a first offender's left hand was cut off and nailed up in a market town.
Q 12Which phrase for anxious suspense comes from the wooden frames that stretched wet woollen cloth as it dried?
On tenterhooks
On tenterhooks: a tenter was the drying frame, and its hooked nails held new cloth taut so it would not shrink; by the 1700s the phrase meant being stretched by suspense.
Q 13To prop up the wool trade, a 1571 English law fined most men and boys who went out on Sundays without what?
A woollen cap
Q 21The Merino breed originated in which region, where exporting the sheep was for centuries a crime?
Iberian Peninsula
The Iberian Peninsula kept its Merinos under a Spanish royal monopoly, with death for smugglers, until 18th-century kings began sending flocks as diplomatic gifts to courts from Saxony to Sweden.
Q 22Merinos sent to France in the 18th century developed into which breed, named after a royal farm?
Rambouillet
Rambouillet blood later reshaped the Australian flock: Emperor, a ram bought by the Peppin family, cut about 11 kg of greasy wool a year and helped set the type of the big-framed Peppin Merino.
Q 23Which army officer turned grazier is remembered as a founder of Australia's wool industry?
A woollen cap was compulsory on Sundays and holidays for every male over six except noblemen; the law went in 1597, but the flat cap stayed on as the mark of the working man.
Q 14The Egtved Girl, buried around 1370 BC in woollen clothes that still survive, was found in an oak coffin in which country?
Denmark
Denmark: the sealed oak trunk kept her woollen clothes and blanket intact for over 3,000 years, though of the girl herself only hair, brain, teeth, nails and a little skin remain.
Q 15Which English city's Victorian mills earned it the name 'wool capital of the world'?
Bradford
Bradford was a market town of cottage spinners in 1800; within fifty years soft water, local coal, steam mills and shiploads of Australian fleece had made it the wool capital of the world.
Q 16Superwash wool resists shrinking because its treatment smooths or coats what on each fibre?
Scales
Scales: they overlap like a ratchet, so fibres rubbed together in the wash slide one way and lock tight, and smoothing them down or sealing them under a thin polymer stops the jumper shrinking.
Q 17A merino suit launched by a Japanese retailer in the late 2000s could be cleaned in what unusual way?
In the shower
In the shower: the wearer rinses odour and dirt off under warm water, and the suit drips dry ready to wear within hours, with no ironing.
Q 18England's wish to protect wool exports to the weavers of Flanders helped push it into which war?
The Hundred Years' War
The Hundred Years' War began in 1337 partly because Flanders, whose cloth towns lived on English fleeces, answered to a French overlord, and the tax on every exported sack filled Edward III's coffers.
Q 19Which napped woollen cloth, made to imitate felt, covers snooker and card tables?
Baize
Baize takes its name from the French for bay, a chestnut brown, though the world now knows it in billiard-table green.
Q 20Which common English surname is traced to workers who pounded new woollen cloth to thicken it?
Walker
Walker probably began as a name for fullers, who thickened new cloth by treading it underfoot, and the same trade left the surnames Fuller and Tucker.
John Macarthur
John Macarthur bought into the first Merinos landed at Sydney in 1797, yet he spent most of 1801 to 1817 in England, so his wife Elizabeth and nephew Hannibal ran and built the flock.
Q 24Sir Joseph Banks helped found George III's prized royal flock of Spanish Merinos at which royal estate?
Kew
Kew made sense because Banks already ran its botanic garden for the king; he went on to write a short book on the Merino, a breed he was instrumental in bringing to England.
Q 25Which Scottish town gave its name to the curling teardrop pattern its weavers copied from Kashmir shawls?
Paisley
Paisley's weavers copied the shawls that British soldiers sent home from India so successfully that by the 1830s the Persian teardrop motif had taken the town's name.
Q 26The old rural chore of 'woolgathering', picking snagged tufts of fleece off hedges, now names which habit?
Idle daydreaming
Idle daydreaming: gatherers wandered from bush to bush for very little return, so by the 1550s woolgathering meant letting the mind drift just as aimlessly.
Q 27Cashmere comes from the fine winter undercoat of a goat; what is the coarse outer coat called?
Guard hair
Guard hair has to be separated out in a dehairing step before the down can be spun; the stiff outer coat is not wasted, ending up in brushes and coat interfacings.
Q 28Mohair is made from the hair of which animal?
Angora goat
Angora goat, not the Angora rabbit, whose fluffier fibre is the one sold as angora; goat, rabbit and the Angora cat all take their name from Ankara in Turkey.
Q 29Which country clipped more than half of the world's mohair in the early 2020s?
South Africa
South Africa inherited a trade Turkey had kept to itself until the 1800s; its flocks graze the dry Karoo, and with neighbouring Lesotho the region clipped about two-thirds of the world's mohair in 2022.
Q 30The word 'mohair' traces back to a term for choice haircloth in which language?
Arabic
Arabic mukhayyar reached English through Italian and French, and its ending was then bent to look like 'hair', which is why the word seems to describe itself.