Wordplay
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50 free Wordplay trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Wordplay is language caught enjoying itself. A pun makes one sound do two jobs, a palindrome reads the same in both directions, and a slip of the tongue can be funnier than the sentence the speaker meant to say. People have played these games for a very long time, from graffiti scratched on ancient walls to the daily puzzle on a phone. This quiz covers the tricks and the people behind them. Expect questions on tongue twisters, blended words, backwards spellings, secret playground languages and famous comic mix-ups, along with the novelists, playwrights, comedians and puzzle editors who made wordplay their trade. Some questions are small puzzles you can work out on the spot. Others tell the story of how a strange term got its name. It is pitched for anyone who likes words: quiz teams, teachers looking for a warm-up, crossword regulars and families at the dinner table. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave with a few new terms to try on your friends.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Oprah Winfrey's studio takes its name from 'Oprah' spelled backwards, matching which Marx brother's stage name?
Harpo
Harpo is 'Oprah' in reverse, and it was also the name of her on-screen husband in The Color Purple, the 1985 film that launched her acting career.
Q 02The joke spelling 'ghoti' borrows sounds from 'enough', 'women' and 'nation' to spell which everyday word?
Fish
Fish is the reading: 'gh' as in enough, 'o' as in women, 'ti' as in nation. The gag is often credited to George Bernard Shaw, yet it appears nowhere in his writings.
Q 03Which comedy duo made famous 'Who's on First?', a routine about baseball players with names like Who and What?
Abbott and Costello
Abbott and Costello built the sketch on one misunderstanding that never clears up. In 1999 Time named it the best comedy sketch of the 20th century.
Q 04Which sweet course of a meal is spelled by reading the word 'stressed' backwards?
Desserts
Desserts and 'stressed' mirror each other letter for letter. Word fans call such a pair an anadrome or, as a joke, an emordnilap, which is 'palindrome' in reverse.
Q 05Which author had Humpty Dumpty describe blended words as a 'portmanteau', with two meanings packed into one?
Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll borrowed the name of a two-part travelling case for the idea in Through the Looking-Glass. Blends such as 'brunch' and 'motel' have been called portmanteaus ever since.
Q 06A word like 'masculine', which carries its own synonym 'male' inside it, is named after which animal?
Kangaroo
Kangaroo words carry a smaller 'joey' word the way the animal carries its young in a pouch. 'Chocolate' carries 'cocoa', and 'inflammable' carries 'flammable'.
Q 07Lynne Truss's punctuation bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves takes its title from a joke about which animal?
Panda
A panda in the joke fires a gun in a café and walks out, because a badly punctuated wildlife guide says it 'eats, shoots and leaves'. One comma turns a diet into a crime.
Q 08In the classic English tongue twister first printed in 1813, Peter Piper picked a peck of what?
Pickled peppers
Pickled peppers fill the peck in a rhyme from John Harris's pronunciation primer, a book that offered a tongue twister for every letter of the alphabet.
Q 09The palindrome that begins 'A man, a plan, a canal' ends by naming which Central American country?
Panama
Panama completes the line, which reads the same in both directions once spaces and punctuation are ignored, just like 'madam' or 'racecar'.
Q 10Which board game did architect Alfred Butts invent in the 1930s under the early names Lexiko and Criss-Crosswords?
Scrabble
Scrabble got its tile counts and point values from Butts tallying how often each letter turned up in newspapers and other print.
Q 11Spoonerisms, slips that swap the opening sounds of two words, are named after a don at which English university?
Oxford
Oxford's William Archibald Spooner, warden of New College, was said to scramble his words this way. Most of the famous slips pinned on him are apocryphal.
Q 12Which fill-in-the-blank word game, created by Leonard Stern and Roger Price, asks players for nouns and adjectives?
Mad Libs
Mad Libs went unnamed for five years, until its creators overheard an actor in a restaurant say he wanted to ad-lib an interview.
Q 13Which playground code moves a word's first consonants to the end and adds 'ay', turning 'banana' into 'ananabay'?
Pig Latin
Q 21Which character in The Simpsons keeps falling for Bart's prank calls asking for customers with pun names?
Moe Szyslak
Moe Szyslak shouts each gag name across his tavern before the penny drops. Matt Groening based him on Louis 'Red' Deutsch, a real man made famous by repeated prank calls.
Q 22In Homer's Odyssey, which false name does Odysseus give the Cyclops Polyphemus before blinding him?
Nobody
Nobody is the alias, so when the blinded giant shouts that Nobody has hurt him, his neighbours decide the gods are to blame and tell him to pray.
Q 23The words 'chortle' and 'galumphing' entered English from which nonsense poem about the killing of a monster?
Jabberwocky
Pig Latin is used mostly by children to confuse adults who have not cracked it. Early uses of the name described a jokey mock Latin instead.
Q 14In Cockney rhyming slang, the phrase 'apples and pears' stands for which part of a house?
Stairs
Stairs rhymes with 'pears', and speakers often drop the rhyming half, so a Londoner going to bed might say they are heading 'up the apples'.
Q 15In which Shakespeare tragedy does the dying Mercutio pun on a word meaning both serious and a burial place?
Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet turns on the joke: 'grave' means both serious and buried, and Mercutio's death sends Romeo after Tybalt and into banishment.
Q 16The Importance of Being Earnest has a title that puns on a man's name; which playwright wrote the comedy?
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde paired the name Ernest with 'earnest', meaning serious, a pun that troubles translators. French productions most often swap in the name Constant to keep the joke.
Q 17Which character in Peggy Parish's children's books takes every figure of speech literally, with comic results?
Amelia Bedelia
Amelia Bedelia is a maid who misreads her orders so reliably that her employers learn to write requests like 'un-dust the furniture' to keep her on track.
Q 18Which Swedish pop group took its name from the first letters of its members' first names?
ABBA
ABBA stands for Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid, and the name reads the same in both directions. Manager Stig Anderson started using it in 1973, tired of unwieldy names.
Q 19The word 'smog', applied to London's foul air in the 1900s, is a blend of 'fog' and which other word?
Smoke
Smoke and fog merged into a name for the dirty haze of big cities. The coinage is usually credited to Henry Antoine Des Voeux in 1905, though the word was in print by 1880.
Q 20The nickname 'Bollywood' blends Hollywood with Bombay, the older name of which Indian city?
Mumbai
Mumbai's Hindi film industry kept the city's older name in its nickname, and the pattern spread: Lahore's film business became known as Lollywood.
Jabberwocky built 'chortle' by blending chuckle and snort, in a poem whose invented words still sound as if they ought to mean something.
Q 24Which children's novel by Norton Juster sends a bored boy named Milo to the pun-filled city of Dictionopolis?
The Phantom Tollbooth
The Phantom Tollbooth takes idioms at their word: Milo's quest, with a dog named Tock at his side, is to rescue two exiled princesses called Rhyme and Reason.
Q 25Which Hall of Fame Yankees catcher became as famous for his accidental, paradoxical sayings as for his baseball?
Yogi Berra
Yogi Berra's off-the-cuff remarks and malapropisms were so quotable that they earned their own name, Yogi-isms, and Barack Obama borrowed one when honouring him.
Q 26What is the name for a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet, like the one about a quick brown fox?
Pangram
A pangram packs in all 26 letters. The fox-and-lazy-dog line was a handwriting practice sentence by 1885 and later became a standard test for typewriters and typefaces.
Q 27Which term describes words such as 'to', 'too' and 'two', which sound the same but differ in spelling and meaning?
Homophones
Homophones are a favourite tool for puns and for misleading clues in puzzles. When the spellings differ, as with 'rain', 'reign' and 'rein', linguists also call them heterographs.
Q 28Which term for a self-contradicting phrase like 'cruel kindness' comes from Greek words meaning 'sharp' and 'dull'?
Oxymoron
An oxymoron is literally 'sharp-dull', so the word is an example of itself. J. R. R. Tolkien read his own surname as a Germanic equivalent, 'dull-keen'.
Q 29The 2006 documentary Wordplay follows which crossword editor and the Stamford tournament he founded in 1978?
Will Shortz
Will Shortz credits the film with swelling the next year's tournament by about 200 contestants, enough to force a move to a bigger venue.
Q 30Arthur Wynne's 1913 'Word-Cross', regarded as the first modern crossword, ran in a Sunday newspaper in which city?
New York
New York was where the Liverpool-born Wynne built puzzles for the 'Fun' section of the Sunday World, adapting an older form called the word diamond.