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164 free Autumn trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
40 free Autumn trivia questions with answers. Autumn is the season of pumpkin patches, changing leaves, and a calendar packed with holidays, and this quiz covers all of it. You'll get questions on why leaves turn red and yellow, where the words 'fall' and 'autumn' came from, the history of Oktoberfest, candy corn, and the Pumpkin Spice Latte, plus the traditions of Halloween, Bonfire Night, Diwali, and Thanksgiving in both the US and Canada. It's written for anyone hosting a fall party, a classroom, or a family game night: about a third of the questions are easy enough for kids, and the rest climb to genuinely tricky facts about Vivaldi, Keats, and woolly bear caterpillars. Every answer has been checked against a primary source such as Wikipedia, a museum, or an official festival page, and each explanation adds one detail you probably didn't know.
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Q 01Which hidden pigments produce the yellows and oranges of autumn foliage?
Carotenoids
Carotenoids, the yellow xanthophylls and orange beta-carotene, sit in the leaf all season and show through once the green fades. Aspens and birches owe their gold to them.
Q 02Autumn yellows were in the leaf all along, but which pigment do trees make fresh each fall to turn leaves red?
Anthocyanins
Red is the only autumn colour a tree has to work for: anthocyanins are made fresh from sugars trapped in the leaf as it seals off, while the yellows are simply unmasked.
Q 03Seeds of which tree are threaded on strings for the British autumn game of conkers?
Horse chestnut
Conkers are the glossy brown seeds of the horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum); each is threaded on a string and players take turns striking an opponent's conker until one shatters.
Q 04From which ancient language is the English word 'autumn' derived?
Latin
Latin autumnus gave Old French autompne, which entered English in the late 1300s; the Latin word's own earlier origin is uncertain.
Q 05What traditional name is given to the full lunar phase that falls nearest the autumnal equinox?
Harvest Moon
The Harvest Moon is the full moon nearest the autumnal equinox; it can land up to two weeks either side of it, so in some years it is an October moon.
Q 06Munich's Oktoberfest, despite its name, opens in which month?
September
The first festival, on 12 October 1810, celebrated Crown Prince Ludwig's wedding to Therese of Saxony-Hildburghausen. It now runs from mid-September to the first Sunday in October, when the weather is kinder.
Q 07Which fruit is most tied to North American autumn celebrations, from pies to carved lanterns?
Pumpkin
Pumpkin pie is a fixture of the Thanksgiving table, and the carved pumpkin is the emblem of the late-October holiday.
Q 08What term describes the autumn feeding frenzy of bears and other large hibernators?
Hyperphagia
Hyperphagia is the late-summer and autumn feeding surge in which a black bear can take in around 20,000 calories a day to lay down fat for hibernation; torpor is the low-metabolism state itself.
Q 09Which English Romantic poet, dead at 25, wrote the ode 'To Autumn' that opens 'Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness'?
John Keats
John Keats wrote 'To Autumn' in 1819 and was dead of tuberculosis within two years, at 25. The ode personifies the season and eases it gently toward winter.
Q 10On what date does meteorological autumn begin in the Northern Hemisphere?
The 1st of the ninth month
Whole-month seasons make year-to-year statistics easier to compare. In the Southern Hemisphere the same convention puts autumn in March, April, and May.
Q 11What was the earliest known name for the season now called autumn or fall in English?
Harvest
German still calls the season Herbst and Dutch herfst. As people moved off the land into towns, 'harvest' shrank to mean only the act of reaping and the newer names took over.
Q 12As late summer ends, which environmental change is the main trigger for deciduous trees to begin reclaiming nutrients from their leaves?
Shortening daylight
Shortening daylight, reinforced by cooling nights, tells a deciduous tree to pull nitrogen and other nutrients back out of its leaves before sealing them off and dropping them.
Q 13Which Pre-Raphaelite painted 'Autumn Leaves' (1855-56), showing four girls gathering fallen leaves?
Q 21Which East Asian holiday, held on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, is celebrated with mooncakes?
Mid-Autumn Festival
The Mid-Autumn Festival, also called the Moon Festival, falls on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, usually in September or early October, when families share mooncakes under the full moon.
Q 22Which genus, tapped for syrup in spring, is famous for red, orange, and yellow autumn foliage?
Maple
Maples, tapped for syrup in early spring, run from bright yellow through orange to fluorescent red in autumn, and single trees often colour unevenly.
Q 23In Vivaldi's Four Seasons, the slow movement of 'Autumn' carries a marking describing what?
Sleeping drunkards
John Everett Millais
John Ruskin called it 'the first instance of a perfectly painted twilight', and Millais's wife Effie said he wanted a picture 'full of beauty and without a subject'.
Q 14Which of these conifers drops all its needles every autumn?
European larch
The European larch is a deciduous conifer: its soft needles turn gold in October and fall, leaving bare branches until spring, while pines, spruces and firs keep theirs through winter.
Q 15Which pigment gives leaves their green color and is broken down in autumn, unmasking the others?
Chlorophyll
Chlorophyll, the green pigment, is broken down into colourless compounds as the tree reclaims its nitrogen and magnesium, letting the yellow and orange pigments beneath show through.
Q 16Which of these fruits is typically harvested during the autumn season?
Apples
Apples ripen from late summer into autumn; the fruit is a pome, and much of the North American crop is pressed into cider, the season's traditional drink.
Q 17Which insect migrates each autumn from across North America to a few mountain forests in central Mexico, thousands of kilometres away?
Monarch butterfly
The entire eastern monarch butterfly population overwinters in so few Mexican trees that it is measured in hectares; it nearly doubled to 1.8 hectares in the 2024-25 winter.
Q 18During which Jewish autumn harvest festival, called the Festival of Ingathering in the Torah, do families eat meals in a temporary hut?
Sukkot
Sukkot's hut, the sukkah, recalls the shelters of the Exodus; the Torah calls the festival the Festival of Ingathering, marking the end of the agricultural year in the Land of Israel.
Q 19Which of these holidays is widely celebrated in autumn, particularly on October 31st?
Halloween
Halloween, 31 October, is the eve of All Hallows' Day and overlaps the old Gaelic quarter day Samhain, kept from 31 October to 1 November in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man.
Q 20What term describes a spell of unseasonably warm, dry weather in late autumn?
Indian summer
An Indian summer is a hazy, warm, dry spell in late autumn; in parts of Europe the same weather is called St Martin's summer, after the saint's day on 11 November.
The Adagio of 'Autumn' is marked 'Ubriachi dormienti', sleeping drunkards: the grape-harvest revellers of the first movement doze off. The set was published in Amsterdam in 1725.
Q 24Candy corn dates to the 1880s, when most Americans lived on farms; under what farm-themed name was it first sold?
Chicken Feed
Candy corn was first sold as 'Chicken Feed', since most Americans then lived on farms and corn was what you fed the birds; Goelitz, the forerunner of Jelly Belly, began making it in 1898.
Q 25What was missing from Starbucks' spiced autumn latte recipe from its 2003 launch until 2015?
Any real pumpkin
Starbucks' Pumpkin Spice Latte launched in 2003 without any real pumpkin; after years of complaints the chain added pumpkin puree to the sauce in 2015.
Q 26Which Roman goddess of fruit trees and orchards is linked to Halloween's apple customs?
Pomona
Pomona was the Roman goddess of fruit trees and orchards, her name from pomum, 'fruit'; 19th-century folklorists tied apple-bobbing and other Halloween apple games to her harvest rites.
Q 27Which US president made the Thanksgiving turkey pardon an official annual tradition in 1989?
George H. W. Bush
Turkeys had been presented to presidents since Truman, but Bush was the first to make sparing the bird a fixed part of the ceremony. The story of Lincoln pardoning his son's turkey only surfaced after his death.
Q 28Who skips trick-or-treating to wait in the pumpkin patch in 'It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown'?
Linus
The special first aired on CBS in October 1966. Charlie Brown, meanwhile, ends the night with a bag full of rocks.
Q 29Which character always appears at the very end of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade?
Santa Claus
Santa Claus has closed the Macy's parade since its first year, 1924, with a single early exception when he led it; in the late 1920s the balloons were released into the sky afterwards, with a reward for whoever found them.
Q 30Which sport's championship is nicknamed the 'Fall Classic'?
Baseball
The World Series, baseball's championship, has been played each autumn since 1903 except in 1904 and 1994; the New York Yankees had won it a record 27 times through 2025.