Candle Trivia
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46 free Candle trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Forty-five candle trivia questions for quiz nights, candle lovers and anyone curious about the small flame that lit the world for two thousand years. The quiz covers how candles were made, from Roman tallow to sperm-whale spermaceti and the paraffin that replaced them, how a wick actually works, and the men who industrialised the candle. Then it moves through candle traditions: birthday cakes, the Hanukkah menorah, Advent wreaths, Candlemas and Groundhog Day, Saint Lucy's crown, Kwanzaa's kinara and the Paschal candle. Pop culture gets its turn too, with 'Candle in the Wind', Yankee Candle, the Cluedo candlestick, candlepin bowling, candlestick charts and Faraday's Christmas Lectures. Questions run from easy to expert and each carries a difficulty score. Every answer has been checked against a Wikipedia article and each question links to its source.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Paraffin wax, the most common candle wax, is a by-product of what?
Petroleum refining
Petroleum refining leaves paraffin wax behind when lubricating oil is purified, so the oil boom of the early 1900s turned candle wax into a cheap leftover.
Q 02Roman dipped candles were made from beeswax and which animal product?
Tallow
Tallow is rendered beef or mutton fat, and it stayed the everyday candle fuel for centuries because it was cheap, even though it smoked and gave off a foul, acrid smell.
Q 03Which consumer-goods giant began in 1837 when a candlemaker and a soapmaker merged their businesses in Cincinnati?
Procter & Gamble
Procter & Gamble made sense as one firm because candles and soap both start with animal fat, and the hog-butchering centre of Cincinnati had plenty of it.
Q 04Which flamboyant pianist made a candelabra on the piano his stage trademark?
Liberace
Liberace took the idea from A Song to Remember, a 1945 film about Chopin in which a candelabra stands on the piano, and added one to his own act two years later.
Q 05What does a candle wick use to draw melted wax up into the flame?
Capillary action
Capillary action pulls the melted wax up the wick, where the heat turns it to vapour, and it is that vapour, not the wick itself, that actually burns.
Q 06Roughly how hot is a candle flame, on average?
About 1,000 °C
About 1,000 °C is the average, and the yellow light comes from tiny carbon particles that are heated until they glow before they burn away.
Q 07Trick birthday candles relight after being blown out because the wick is laced with which metal?
Magnesium
Magnesium flecks in the wick catch from the ember that still glows after the flame is blown out, and they burn hot enough to relight the wax vapour.
Q 08Which harder, brighter-burning candle material did Chevreul patent in 1825 after separating it from animal fat?
Stearin
Stearin made candles that were hard and burned cleanly, and it later rescued paraffin, which melted too easily until some was blended in.
Q 09Which SI unit of luminous intensity is roughly the light given off by one ordinary candle?
The candela
The candela takes its name from the Latin for candle, and when it was defined in 1948 it was sized so that an ordinary candle still gives out about one candela.
Q 10The Victorian unit 'candlepower' was defined by the light of a single pure candle made of what?
Spermaceti
Spermaceti, a wax from the head of the sperm whale, became plentiful as whaling boomed in the late 1700s, and it burned brighter and stayed firmer in summer heat than any candle before it.
Q 11Which English king is said to have measured time with six marked candles that each burned for four hours?
Alfred the Great
Alfred the Great, his biographer Asser wrote, found that draughts made the candles burn down too fast, so he had a lantern built of wood and ox-horn shaved thin enough to see through.
Q 12Which Shakespeare character cries 'Out, out, brief candle!' on learning that his wife is dead?
Macbeth
Macbeth answers the news by calling life a walking shadow and a tale told by an idiot, 'full of sound and fury', the line that gave William Faulkner the title of a novel.
Q 13Elton John's original 1973 'Candle in the Wind' was a tribute to whom?
Marilyn Monroe
Q 21Which American folk holiday grew out of a German Candlemas tradition?
Groundhog Day
Groundhog Day came over with German settlers in Pennsylvania, who believed a sunny Candlemas meant more winter and handed the forecasting job, a badger's back home, to the groundhog.
Q 22Which scientist's Christmas Lectures for young people were published as The Chemical History of a Candle?
Michael Faraday
Michael Faraday told his young audience there was no better open door into science than a burning candle, then used one to explain combustion, gases and even breathing.
Q 23Candlestick charts, now standard on stock-market screens, are credited to Japanese traders of which commodity?
Rice
Marilyn Monroe is addressed in it by her birth name, Norma Jeane, though lyricist Bernie Taupin has said the song is really about fame and could as easily have been about James Dean.
Q 14Where did Elton John give his only public performance of 'Candle in the Wind 1997'?
Westminster Abbey
Westminster Abbey heard it at Diana's funeral on 6 September 1997, and he never sang those words in public again, going back to the 1973 original at his concerts.
Q 15In which country do people float candlelit baskets called krathong on rivers each year?
Thailand
Thailand's Loy Krathong means 'float a basket': the little raft carries a candle and flowers away downstream and, Thais believe, bad luck goes with it.
Q 16Candles on a birthday cake are traced to the 18th century in which country, also home of the Christmas tree?
Germany
Germany's Count Zinzendorf marked his birthday in 1746 with a cake as big as the oven would take, with holes cut in it for a candle per year of his age and one more in the middle.
Q 17By tradition, what makes a birthday wish come true?
All the candles go out in one breath
All the candles go out in one breath, the superstition runs, and the wish has to stay secret, because telling anyone is supposed to stop it coming true.
Q 18How many branches does a Hanukkah menorah have?
Nine
Nine: one for each of the eight nights and a ninth for the candle that lights the others, which sets it apart from the seven-branched menorah of the ancient Temple.
Q 19What is the helper candle on a Hanukkah menorah called?
The shamash
The shamash, Hebrew for 'helper' or 'servant', is set on a different level from the other eight, marking it out as the working candle that lights them rather than one of the night's lights.
Q 20In France, Candlemas is known as la Chandeleur and is traditionally celebrated by eating what?
Crêpes
Crêpes are flipped with a coin held in the other hand, since landing one cleanly is meant to bring a prosperous year, and their round golden shape is said to recall the returning sun.
Rice dealer Munehisa Homma, trading in the 1700s, usually gets the credit, though Steve Nison, who brought the charts to the West in 1991, thinks they took shape a century after him.
Q 24The candlestick is one of the six original weapons in which 1949 board game?
Cluedo
Cluedo, sold as Clue in North America, was devised by Anthony Pratt at home in Birmingham during wartime air raids, when he recalled the murder-mystery games played at parties.
Q 25In which US state was candlepin bowling, with its tall thin pins, invented in 1880?
Massachusetts
Justin White's Worcester game gives three balls a frame, and nobody has ever bowled a sanctioned 300; the record is 245.
Q 26The oily candlefish was traded along 'grease trails' by peoples of which region?
The Pacific Northwest
The Pacific Northwest's coastal peoples boiled the fish, the eulachon, down into a rich grease so prized inland that the trade routes it travelled were named after it.
Q 27Karl Duncker's 'candle problem' asks you to fix a candle to a wall using matches and a box of what?
Thumbtacks
Thumbtacks are almost a decoy: the answer is to empty their box and tack that to the wall as a shelf for the candle, which most people miss because they see the box only as a container.
Q 28What did Glucksberg's 1962 version of the candle problem find about offering cash prizes?
They made people perform worse
They made people perform worse: the group racing for cash took longer on average, and the usual explanation is that a reward narrows the focus just when a fresh idea is needed.
Q 29What does a Roman candle firework do?
Ejects a series of stars from a tube
Ejects a series of stars from a tube because the tube is packed in layers: each star sits on its own small propellant charge, and a slow-burning fuse works its way down the stack.
Q 30On 13 December, girls in Sweden wear a crown of candles in honour of which martyr?
Lucia
Lucia, legend says, carried food to the poor through dark tunnels during the Roman persecutions with candles on her head to light the way, which is why the girl chosen to play her wears the crown.