Q 01/05

Who could not put Humpty Dumpty together again?

A) All the king's horses and all the king's men

B) All the queen's guards and all her ladies

C) The doctors and the nurses

D) His mother and his father

Answer · why

A) All the king's horses and all the king's men

All the king's horses and all the king's men can't mend him, yet the rhyme never says what he is: it probably began as a riddle, and the answer was an...

Q 02/05

Which author turned Humpty Dumpty into a talking egg in an 1871 book?

A) J. M. Barrie

B) Lewis Carroll

C) Edward Lear

D) Charles Kingsley

Answer · why

B) Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll put him in Through the Looking-Glass, where Humpty tells Alice that a word means just what he chooses it to mean, neither more nor less.

Q 03/05

In 18th-century English slang, what kind of person was called a 'humpty dumpty'?

A) A proud, boastful person

B) A short, clumsy person

C) A loud, drunken person

D) A tall, lanky person

Answer · why

B) A short, clumsy person

A short, clumsy person, in Francis Grose's slang dictionary of 1785. The words had named a drink before that, ale boiled with brandy, and only later a...

Q 04/05

An unproven story says Humpty Dumpty was a Royalist cannon in which English town's siege of 1648?

A) Bristol

B) Chester

C) Worcester

D) Colchester

Answer · why

D) Colchester

Colchester. In the tale, Parliament's guns blast a Royalist cannon off the town wall, but the rhyme is not found in print until around 1800, a century...

Q 05/05

What did Jack and Jill go up the hill to fetch?

A) A pail of water

B) A bale of hay

C) A basket of apples

D) A bundle of sticks

Answer · why

A) A pail of water

A pail of water. Climbing a hill for it may not be so odd: dew ponds were dug on hilltops, and they held water through droughts when the ponds in the ...