50 free Word trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
42 free word trivia questions with answers. Every word has a backstory, and some of them are better than the things they describe. This word trivia quiz covers etymologies (why a salary is salty, what avocado meant in Nahuatl, which Czech play gave us robot, who Captain Boycott was), the words with no rhyme, the longest words in the dictionary, palindromes and pangrams, portmanteaus, spoonerisms and malapropisms, and the people and books behind the OED and Webster's. It also covers the games: how Scrabble's letter values were worked out, who made Wordle and why the New York Times bought it, what the first Spelling Bee winner had to spell, and, since this is a trivia site, where the word 'trivia' comes from. Difficulty runs from easy pub-quiz staples to genuinely obscure lexicography. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the words, games and dictionaries involved, and each question carries its source. No folk etymologies passed off as fact.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'trivia' comes from Latin 'triviae', which literally meant what?
Three roads
A spot where three roads met was a public place, so 'trivialis' came to mean commonplace; the modern quiz sense dates only from 1960s college contests.
Q 02Bread with a filling is named after an 18th-century English aristocrat with what title?
The Earl of Sandwich
John Montagu, the 4th Earl, is said to have wanted food he could eat while gaming and drinking without leaving the table.
Q 03'Quarantine' comes from the Venetian word for what period of time?
Forty days
Ships were held for that long during plague years; the Black Death had killed an estimated 30 percent of Europe.
Q 04The word 'salary' derives from the Latin word for which substance?
Salt
Whether Roman soldiers were literally paid in it is disputed, but 'salarium' clearly comes from 'sal'.
Q 05The 'mare' in 'nightmare' originally referred to what?
A chest-sitting demon
The word has no etymological link to the horse; the folkloric mare brought frightening dreams by pressing on the sleeper.
Q 06The word 'robot' entered English from a 1920 play written in which language?
Czech
Karel Čapek's R.U.R. used it, but he credited his brother Josef with actually coining it from a word for forced labour.
Q 07'Sabotage' comes from a French word for what item?
A wooden shoe
The popular story that workers threw sabots into machinery is a false etymology; the word first meant to bungle or make noise with clogs.
Q 08'Avocado' traces back to a Nahuatl word that also served as the word for what?
Testicle
Molina's Nahuatl dictionary gives 'auacatl' as the translation for both, and the Spanish 'aguacate' followed.
Q 09'Muscle' comes from the Latin 'musculus', meaning what?
Little mouse
A flexed biceps was thought to look like a mouse moving under the skin.
Q 10According to the most accepted theory, 'OK' began in the late 1830s as a jokey abbreviation of what?
'Oll korrect'
The 1840 Van Buren campaign then claimed it stood for 'Old Kinderhook', which helped it spread nationally.
Q 11Which 45-letter lung-disease word is the longest in major English dictionaries?
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
It was coined in 1935 by the president of the National Puzzlers' League, and doctors just say silicosis.
Q 12What is the longest non-technical dictionary word, meaning "the act of estimating something as worthless"?
Floccinaucinihilipilification
It is a chain of Latin words all meaning 'nothing', and its use has been recorded as far back as 1741.
Q 13Roughly how many letters long is the full chemical name of the protein titin?
189,800
Q 21Which two English words are most often cited as having no true rhyme?
Orange and silver
Writers cheat with 'door hinge' or the Welsh hill Blorenge; the other pairs are also rhyme-poor but less famous.
Q 22Which 1486 English text popularised fanciful collective nouns for animals such as a 'parliament' of owls?
The Book of Saint Albans
Its reprints through the 16th century fixed 'terms of venery' like these in Standard English even where they were jokes.
Q 23Which American architect invented Scrabble, valuing letters by their frequency in newspapers?
Alfred Mosher Butts
Chemical nomenclature is open-ended, which is why dictionaries do not count it as a real word.
Q 14Who introduced the word 'palindrome' to English in 1638?
Henry Peacham
The concept is far older: the Latin Sator Square from the first century reads the same in four directions.
Q 15'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' is the best-known English example of what?
A pangram
Western Union used it to test telex equipment; the novel Ella Minnow Pea is built around the search for a shorter one.
Q 16'Brunch' and 'smog' are examples of what kind of word?
Portmanteaus
Lewis Carroll popularised the term through Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass, explaining 'slithy' as lithe plus slimy.
Q 17'Boycott' is named after Captain Charles Boycott, a land agent shunned in which country in 1880?
Ireland
The tactic was suggested by Charles Stewart Parnell during the Land War, and the surname became a verb within months.
Q 18'Silhouette' takes its name from Étienne de Silhouette, who held what job in 1759 France?
Finance minister
His austerity measures during the Seven Years' War made his name a byword for anything cheap and stripped down, like a shadow portrait.
Q 19A word like 'cleave' or 'sanction' that can mean its own opposite is called what?
A contronym
The alternative name 'Janus word' refers to the two-faced Roman god.
Q 20According to the classic sequence 'ETAOIN', which letter is the most common in English text?
E
Frequency analysis goes back to the ninth-century Arab mathematician al-Kindi, who used it to break ciphers.
He created it in Poughkeepsie in 1931 as a variant of his game Lexiko; James Brunot bought the rights in 1948 and named it Scrabble.
Q 24Which two letters are worth 10 points each in English Scrabble?
Q and Z
The highest single play ever reported scored 1,786 points using OXYPHENBUTAZONE across three triple-word squares.
Q 25Wordle was created by a Welsh software engineer with what surname?
Wardle
Josh Wardle built it for his partner and released it publicly in October 2021; the New York Times bought it in January 2022 for a 'low seven-figure sum'.
Q 26How many attempts does a Wordle player get to guess the five-letter word?
Six
The shareable grid of coloured emoji squares, added late in 2021, is what turned it into a worldwide habit.
Q 27In which year did the Oxford English Dictionary begin publication?
1884
Work had started in 1857; the finished first edition arrived in fascicles, and the second edition of 1989 ran to 20 volumes.
Q 28Which children's author gave us the first recorded use of the word 'nerd', in 1950?
Dr. Seuss
It names a creature Gerald McGrew wants to collect in If I Ran the Zoo; the slang sense showed up in Newsweek a year later.
Q 29Which word did Frank Neuhauser spell to win the very first National Spelling Bee in 1925?
Gladiolus
The Bee began as a consolidation of local contests organised by the Louisville Courier-Journal.
Q 30The ampersand was once commonly recited as the 27th letter of what?
The English alphabet
Its shape is a ligature of the Latin 'et', and its name comes from children chanting 'and per se and' at the end of the alphabet.