Cincinnati Trivia
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96 free Cincinnati trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
64 free Cincinnati trivia questions with answers. This Cincinnati trivia quiz is for anyone who knows the difference between a three-way and a four-way and would like to prove it. It covers how the city got its name and its nicknames (Queen City, Porkopolis, the Paris of America), the German immigrants who built Over-the-Rhine, and the companies that started here: the soap makers who accidentally named a TV genre, the grocer with $372, the potato chip in a tube. Sports fans get the Red Stockings of 1869, the Big Red Machine, the Nasty Boys, Pete Rose's hit record, Paul Brown's Bengals and the Ickey Shuffle. There are questions on the zoo (Martha, Fiona, Harambe), Union Terminal and the Hall of Justice, the Roebling bridge, Music Hall's ghosts, Kings Island's Beast, WKRP, and natives from William Howard Taft to Steven Spielberg and Bootsy Collins. Use it for a bar quiz, a family game or a newcomer's crash course. Every answer has been checked against an encyclopaedic or primary source and each question shows its citation once you have answered.
30 of 96 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Cincinnati sits on the Ohio River directly across from which state?
Kentucky
Kentucky even holds Cincinnati's airport: CVG sits across the river near Hebron, and its code comes from Covington, the nearest city when the airport opened.
Q 02Which of these is a nickname of Cincinnati?
The Queen City
The Queen City was a title Cincinnatians took up in the early 19th century as their river port boomed; the Gem City is Dayton, the Forest City is Cleveland and the Rubber City is Akron.
Q 03Which meat trade made 1840s Cincinnati the largest processing centre in the United States?
Pork packing
Pork packing earned Cincinnati the nickname 'Porkopolis', in print by about 1840; Chicago later took over both the trade and the nickname.
Q 04Who was first president general of the Society of the Cincinnati, the city's namesake order?
George Washington
George Washington was the Society of the Cincinnati's first president general, from 1783 until his death in 1799; the Continental Army officers' order took its name from the Roman farmer-dictator Cincinnatus.
Q 05What was Cincinnati's original name when it was settled in 1788?
Losantiville
Losantiville was surveyor John Filson's invention, pieced together from scraps of several languages to mean 'town opposite the mouth of the Licking', the river that meets the Ohio there; the name was dropped in 1790.
Q 06In the late 19th century, Cincinnati was widely nicknamed the what of America?
Paris
Paris: the 'Paris of America' label is credited to a judge's speech, and it stuck in 1878 when the Cincinnati Commercial newspaper took it up and the city's boosters made it a catch-line.
Q 07Which immigrant group most shaped 19th-century Cincinnati, founding many of its institutions?
German
German immigrants built much of Over-the-Rhine, the district named for the canal they crossed each day and jokingly called 'the Rhine'; in German it was 'über den Rhein'.
Q 08Over-the-Rhine is named for which waterway that immigrants crossed to reach the neighbourhood?
The Miami and Erie Canal
The Miami and Erie Canal, which ran along the route of today's Central Parkway, was nicknamed 'the Rhine' by the immigrants living beyond it; crossing it took you 'over the Rhine'.
Q 09Which company, founded in Cincinnati in 1837 by a candlemaker and a soap maker, gave the radio serial genre its name?
Procter & Gamble
Procter & Gamble, founded in 1837 by candlemaker William Procter and soap maker James Gamble, sponsored radio serials such as 'Ma Perkins' from 1933, which is why the genre is called soap opera.
Q 10Which quality of Ivory soap, launched in 1879, became a famous advertising slogan?
It floats
'It floats' became an Ivory slogan because air whipped into the soap kept the bar on top of the bathwater. Its other famous line, '99 44/100% pure', came from lab analyses the company commissioned.
Q 11Which supermarket giant was founded in Cincinnati in 1883 by a 23-year-old with $372 in savings?
Kroger
Kroger began when Barney Kroger put his savings into a grocery at 66 Pearl Street; in 1901 he started baking his own bread, reasoning it would cut his costs and give shoppers a fresher, cheaper loaf.
Q 12Which potato chip brand was created by a Cincinnati consumer-goods giant better known for soap?
Pringles
Pringles came from a 1956 assignment at Cincinnati's soap-and-detergent giant to cure broken, greasy chips: pressed from potato dough into identical saddle shapes, they stack unbroken in a tube.
Q 13Cincinnati chili, the city's best-known dish, is traditionally served over what?
Spaghetti
Q 21Which Major League Baseball milestone happened at Cincinnati's ballpark in 1935?
The first night game
The first night game in the majors was played on 24 May 1935, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt pressed a button at the White House to switch on the lights and the Reds beat Philadelphia 2-1.
Q 22Which Reds pitcher threw no-hitters in consecutive starts in June 1938?
Johnny Vander Meer
Johnny Vander Meer's second no-hitter came four days after his first and ended on a knife-edge: bases loaded, two out in the ninth in Brooklyn, before Leo Durocher's fly ball was caught. No pitcher has matched it.
Q 23What nickname was given to the dominant Reds teams of the mid-1970s?
Spaghetti is the base of Cincinnati chili, a thin meat sauce spiced with cinnamon, allspice and clove that Macedonian immigrants created in 1922 and ladled over a plate of pasta.
Q 14In Cincinnati chili parlour lingo, what does a 'three-way' add on top of a 'two-way'?
Cheese
Cheese, a mound of shredded cheddar, makes a three-way; a four-way slips onions or beans under it and a five-way has both. Locals eat it like a casserole, cutting each bite with the side of a fork.
Q 15Which Cincinnati chili parlour, where the dish began, took its name in 1922 from the burlesque theatre next door?
Empress Chili
Empress Chili was the Kiradjieff brothers' name for the hot dog stand they opened beside the Empress theatre; it was the city's biggest chili chain until a former employee started Skyline in 1949.
Q 16Skyline Chili takes its name from the city view at its first restaurant, opened in 1949 in which Cincinnati neighbourhood?
Price Hill
Price Hill is where Greek immigrant Nicholas Lambrinides, who had cooked at another chili parlour, opened his own diner on Glenway Avenue with three of his sons.
Q 17Goetta, a Cincinnati breakfast staple, is a sausage-like mush of ground meat and which grain?
Steel-cut oats
Steel-cut oats, also called pinhead oats, are simmered with ground pork and beef to make goetta; immigrant families used the grain to stretch meat across several meals, much as scrapple uses cornmeal.
Q 18Cincinnati's Graeter's is known for which method that makes unusually dense ice cream?
The French pot process
The French pot process freezes just a few gallons at a time in a spinning chilled pot, folding in very little air, which gives Graeter's its dense texture; Oprah Winfrey praised it in 2002.
Q 19Findlay, founded in 1852 in Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine, is Ohio's oldest continuously operating what?
Public market
Public market: Findlay is the last survivor of nine public markets that once served Cincinnati; its iron-framed market house went up in 1852 but, after disputes with the contractors, did not open until 1855.
Q 20The Reds' first World Series title, in 1919, was tainted because which opponents lost on purpose?
Chicago White Sox
The Chicago White Sox threw the 1919 Series for gamblers; eight players, including 'Shoeless' Joe Jackson, were banned for life in the Black Sox scandal.
The Big Red Machine
The Big Red Machine took its final shape when a 1971 trade brought Joe Morgan from Houston to join Johnny Bench, Tony Pérez and Pete Rose; it won the World Series in 1975 and again in 1976.
Q 24Which relief trio helped the Reds sweep the 1990 World Series and were nicknamed 'the Nasty Boys'?
Dibble, Charlton and Myers
Dibble, Charlton and Myers, relievers Rob Dibble, Norm Charlton and Randy Myers, did not let heavily favoured Oakland score against them in nearly nine innings; Dibble and Myers had already shared the NLCS MVP award.
Q 25Great American Ball Park replaced which venue the Reds shared with the Bengals?
Riverfront Stadium
Riverfront Stadium, renamed Cinergy Field in 1996, lost much of its outfield seating in 2001 to make room for Great American Ball Park rising next door, and was imploded at the end of 2002.
Q 26Which legendary coach founded the Cincinnati Bengals in 1967?
Paul Brown
Paul Brown, fired by Cleveland owner Art Modell in 1963, founded the Bengals as an AFL expansion team in 1967 and coached them through 1975; he chose the same shade of orange his old team wore.
Q 27Which team beat the Bengals in the Super Bowl in both 1982 and 1989?
San Francisco 49ers
The San Francisco 49ers beat the Bengals 26-21 in Super Bowl XVI (January 1982) and 20-16 in Super Bowl XXIII (January 1989), the latter on Joe Montana's last-minute drive; the Bengals lost again to the Rams in 2022.
Q 28Which Bengals running back was famous for an end-zone dance called 'the Shuffle' in the late 1980s?
Ickey Woods
Ickey Woods, a rookie in 1988, ran for 1,066 yards and 15 touchdowns and celebrated each score with the Ickey Shuffle, helping the Bengals reach Super Bowl XXIII.
Q 29Before TQL Stadium opened in 2021, FC Cincinnati drew record crowds at which venue?
Nippert Stadium
Nippert Stadium, the University of Cincinnati's football ground, was FC Cincinnati's home from 2016 to 2020; the club broke the USL attendance record there in its first season, and MLS awarded it a franchise in 2018.
Q 30The Cincinnati Zoo, opened in 1875, bills itself as which of these among American zoos?
The second oldest
The second oldest is the zoo's own billing, counting only Philadelphia's, opened in 1874, as older; menageries in New York's Central Park and Chicago's Lincoln Park date from the 1860s.