Word Trivia
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99 free Word trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 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.
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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, 4th Earl of Sandwich, reputedly asked for meat between bread so he could keep gaming without leaving the table, and the dish took his title.
Q 03'Quarantine' comes from the Venetian word for what period of time?
Forty days
Forty days was how long Venice made ships from plague-stricken ports wait offshore, so any hidden cases aboard would show before anyone landed.
Q 04The word 'salary' derives from the Latin word for which substance?
Salt
Salt: Latin 'salarium' comes from 'sal', though the popular claim that Roman soldiers were paid in salt is unsupported by ancient texts.
Q 05Which English word's second half comes from an Old English goblin said to sit on sleepers' chests?
Nightmare
Nightmare: its 'mare' was that goblin, unrelated to the horse, and the word only came to mean any bad dream in the 1820s.
Q 06The word 'robot' entered English from a 1920 play written in which language?
Czech
Karel Čapek's Czech play R.U.R. (1920) introduced 'robot'; he credited his brother Josef with coining it from 'robota', the Czech word for forced labour.
Q 07'Sabotage' comes from a French word for what item?
A wooden shoe
'Sabot' is a French wooden shoe; 'saboter' first meant to clatter in clogs or bungle work, and the tale of workers throwing shoes into machinery is probably apocryphal.
Q 08Which food's name traces back to a Nahuatl word that also meant testicle?
Avocado
Avocado: testicle was only a secondary sense of Nahuatl 'ahuacatl', which first meant the fruit, so avocados weren't named after testicles.
Q 09'Muscle' comes from the Latin 'musculus', meaning what?
Little mouse
Little mouse: a flexed biceps was thought to look like a mouse moving under the skin, and Greek 'mys' also meant both mouse and muscle.
Q 10Which president's supporters formed 'O.K. Clubs' in 1840, playing on his nickname 'Old Kinderhook'?
Martin Van Buren
Martin Van Buren's backers borrowed 'OK' from Boston newspapers, where it had begun in 1839 as a joke abbreviation of 'oll korrect'.
Q 11What is the name for the dot above a lowercase i or j?
Tittle
The tittle is the small dot above lowercase i and j; the word survives in the biblical phrase 'one jot or one tittle' (Matthew 5:18).
Q 12Which famously long word means 'the act of estimating something as worthless'?
Floccinaucinihilipilification
'Floccinaucinihilipilification' strings together Latin words for 'nothing' (flocci, nauci, nihili, pili); William Shenstone used it in a 1741 letter.
Q 13Roughly how many letters long is the full chemical name of the protein titin?
189,800
189,800 is close: titin's full chemical name runs to 189,819 letters, and it is sometimes called the longest word in any language.
Q 21A 'murder' is the famous collective noun for a group of which birds?
Crows
Crows: 'a murder' is one of the medieval 'terms of venery', fanciful names for animal groups such as a 'gaggle' of geese.
Q 22Which American architect invented Scrabble, valuing letters by their frequency in newspapers?
Alfred Mosher Butts
Alfred Mosher Butts, then an out-of-work architect, counted letters on The New York Times front page, and James Brunot later renamed his game Scrabble.
Q 23Which two letters are worth 10 points each in English Scrabble?
Q and Z
Q and Z score 10 because they are among the rarest letters in English, while vowels and common letters such as L, N, R, S and T score 1.
Q 14Which island completes the palindrome 'Able was I ere I saw…', often attributed to Napoleon?
Elba
Elba spells 'able' backwards, so the line gets pinned on Napoleon, who was exiled there in 1814 and escaped less than a year later.
Q 15'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' is the best-known English example of what?
A pangram
A pangram uses every letter of the alphabet, and in the novel Ella Minnow Pea an island's council bans each letter that falls from a monument bearing this sentence.
Q 16'Brunch' and 'smog' are examples of what kind of word?
Portmanteaus
Portmanteaus were popularised by Lewis Carroll through Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass, who explains 'slithy' as lithe plus slimy.
Q 17'Boycott' is named after Captain Charles Boycott, a land agent shunned in which country in 1880?
Ireland
Boycott was a land agent in County Mayo, Ireland; Charles Stewart Parnell urged the Land League to shun such men, and the surname became a verb within months.
Q 18A penny-pinching French finance minister of 1759 gave his name to which English word?
Silhouette
Silhouette: Étienne de Silhouette's petty wartime economies made his name mean 'cheap', so it stuck to the inexpensive cut-paper shadow portrait.
Q 19A word like 'cleave' or 'sanction' that can mean its own opposite is called what?
A contronym
A contronym (also 'Janus word', after the two-faced Roman god) carries opposite senses: 'cleave' means both split and cling, 'sanction' both permit and penalise.
Q 20Which fruit is the classic example of an English word with no perfect rhyme?
Orange
Orange has no true rhyme among common English words, though the Blorenge, a mountain in Wales, is one of the few names that fits.
Q 24Wordle was created by a Welsh software engineer with what surname?
Wardle
Josh Wardle made the game for his partner, Palak Shah, and The New York Times bought it in January 2022 for a 'low seven-figure' sum.
Q 25In Wordle's standard colours, which tile colour marks a correct letter in the wrong spot?
Yellow
Yellow means right letter, wrong spot, and the shareable grid of those coloured squares is what made Wordle go viral in late 2021.
Q 26Which author's first job after World War I was at the Oxford English Dictionary?
Tolkien
Tolkien researched words beginning with W, then left in 1920 to become Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds.
Q 27Which children's author gave us the first recorded use of the word 'nerd', in 1950?
Dr. Seuss
Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo (1950) lists a 'Nerd' among the creatures Gerald McGrew wants to collect; the slang sense surfaced in Newsweek the next year.
Q 28Which author introduced the words 'doublethink' and 'Big Brother' in a 1949 novel?
George Orwell
George Orwell introduced both in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and his own name became the adjective 'Orwellian' for totalitarian social practices.
Q 29The ampersand was once commonly recited as the 27th letter of what?
The English alphabet
The English alphabet was once recited ending '…X, Y, Z, and per se and', which children slurred into the word 'ampersand'.
Q 30The placeholder text 'Lorem ipsum' is a scrambled passage from which Roman writer?
Cicero
The passage is mangled from Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum (45 BC), as Richard McClintock showed; Letraset transfer sheets made it standard in the 1960s.