Cotton Trivia
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47 free Cotton trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This cotton trivia quiz covers the soft, fluffy fibre that clothes the world, from Neolithic threads at Mehrgarh to genetically modified crops and a seed that sprouted on the far side of the Moon. The easy questions handle the basics: what cotton is made of, the part of the plant it grows in, the machine Eli Whitney patented, the city called Cottonopolis, the country that grows the most and the fabric behind blue jeans. From there it moves through the fibre's history: the four commercial species, Aztec tribute, medieval Europe's belief in plant-borne sheep, the East India Company's calicos, Hargreaves' spinning jenny and the Lancashire mills. The harder half is for history and textile buffs: the Calico Acts, King Cotton and the Union blockade, the Lancashire Cotton Famine, Egypt's cotton bankruptcy, Gandhi's khadi and the boll weevil that got its own monument in Alabama, plus the science of linters, gossypol, Bt cotton and cotton's enormous thirst for water. If you enjoyed our Industrial Revolution or fashion quizzes, this is the deep dive on the fibre in your T-shirt. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for cotton, the cotton gin, denim, the boll weevil and the related places, people and inventions before publishing.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Cotton fibre is almost pure what?
Cellulose
Cellulose makes up nearly all of a cotton fibre; in 1846 the chemist Christian Schönbein found that dipping cotton in nitric and sulphuric acids turned it into an explosive, guncotton.
Q 02Which cotton uniform cloth, first worn by British Indian troops in the 1840s, takes its name from the Urdu for 'dusty'?
Khaki
Khaki comes from the Urdu khaki, 'dusty'; the Corps of Guides, raised on India's north-west frontier in 1846, wore it because the dull colour hid soldiers against dry, dusty ground.
Q 03Cotton belongs to which group of plants, alongside hibiscus and okra?
The mallows
The mallows, family Malvaceae, also include cacao and the marsh mallow, whose root once went into marshmallow sweets, which makes cotton a cousin of both chocolate and the original marshmallow.
Q 04The word 'cotton' comes from which language's word 'qutn'?
Arabic
Arabic qutn gave English the word by way of Old French coton, because Arab merchants were the ones who carried cotton cloth into medieval Europe.
Q 05From which city does the name of the fine cotton cloth muslin derive?
Mosul
Mosul, in present-day Iraq, is the city dictionaries credit with the cloth's European name, through Italian mussolina and French mousseline, although the most prized muslin was woven far to the east, in India.
Q 06Which Tuskegee scientist urged Southern farmers to rotate soil-exhausting cotton with peanuts and sweet potatoes?
George Washington Carver
George Washington Carver taught that peanuts and other legumes put back the nitrogen that years of cotton had stripped from the soil, and he devised new uses for them, even a peanut milk, so the crops would sell.
Q 07Which Arizona people share their name with a premium cotton first bred there in the early 1900s?
The Pima
The Pima helped raise the trial crops on a government test farm in Arizona, where breeders were developing the cotton from imported seed.
Q 08The oldest known cotton fibres in the Old World, preserved inside a copper bead, were found at Mehrgarh in which modern country?
Pakistan
Pakistan's Mehrgarh, a Neolithic site in Balochistan, yielded the fibres, which had mineralised inside the bead's corroding copper; that is how they lasted from the sixth millennium BC.
Q 09Which people's warriors wore ichcahuipilli, armour of quilted cotton?
The Aztecs
The Aztecs' ichcahuipilli, Nahuatl for 'cotton shirt', packed unspun cotton between layers of cloth so tightly that it could blunt clubs, arrows and obsidian-edged swords.
Q 10Which Greek historian of the fifth century BC wrote that trees in India bore wool finer than sheep's?
Herodotus
Herodotus wrote that India's wild trees grew a wool finer than any sheep's, which the Indians wore; German still calls cotton Baumwolle, 'tree wool', a name thought to go back to his report.
Q 11Raw cotton is pressed and traded in which unit, standardised in the United States at about 500 pounds?
The bale
The bale is made at the gin, where loose fibre is squeezed into a dense block that can be stacked and shipped; the American standard weighs about 500 pounds and is counted as 480 pounds of cleaned cotton.
Q 12Which treatment, named after the English chemist who devised it in 1844, soaks cotton in caustic soda to add lustre?
Mercerisation
Mercerisation is named after John Mercer, who found that a bath of caustic soda shrinks cotton fibres and leaves them stronger and far readier to take dye.
Q 13Which Mughal province was the empire's most important centre of cotton production?
Bengal
Q 21By the mid-19th century, what nickname described the fibre's dominance of the Southern American economy?
King Cotton
King Cotton was the slogan of Southern politicians who argued Britain's dependence on the fibre would force it to back their cause; growing it was the main work of enslaved people.
Q 22During the American Civil War, the collapse of raw fibre imports caused a depression in North West England known as what?
The Lancashire Cotton Famine
The Lancashire Cotton Famine of 1861–65 idled mills and threw hundreds of thousands out of work when the Union blockade, and the Confederacy's own embargo, cut off American cotton.
Q 23Which country's cotton boom during the American Civil War ended in bankruptcy in 1876 and British occupation in 1882?
Bengal, centred on Dhaka, wove muslin so sheer that poets called it 'woven air'; under British rule the trade collapsed, and both the craft and the cotton plant it depended on died out.
Q 14Which cheap, colourful Indian cloths, imported by the East India Company, proved so popular that Parliament banned them in 1721?
Calico and chintz
Calico and chintz, printed and painted cottons from India, sold so well that English cloth makers demanded protection; Parliament banned first their import, in 1700, and then the wearing of them.
Q 15A 1721 British law banning printed cotton clothes was titled an act to 'preserve and encourage' which two home industries?
Wool and silk
Wool and silk makers won the ban after protests that turned violent, with London weavers attacking women in the street for wearing the imported cottons.
Q 16Who invented the spinning jenny around 1764?
James Hargreaves
James Hargreaves, a weaver, built the jenny to spin several threads at once; in 1768 local spinners who feared for their jobs wrecked his machines, and he moved to Nottingham.
Q 17Which English city earned the nickname 'Cottonopolis'?
Manchester
Manchester was so closely tied to the cotton trade that 'manchester' became the everyday word in Australia and New Zealand for household linen such as sheets and pillowcases.
Q 18Which American inventor patented the modern cotton gin in 1794?
Eli Whitney
Eli Whitney's 1794 patent covered a wire-toothed gin that pulled fibre from short-staple seeds; by making upland cotton profitable it drove a huge expansion of slavery in the American South.
Q 19What is the word 'gin' in 'cotton gin' short for?
Engine
Engine had been clipped to 'gin' since the Middle Ages, when it meant any clever contraption, which is why a snare for catching game is also called a gin.
Q 20After the Civil War, which farming system tied many freed families to cotton plantations through a cycle of debt?
Sharecropping
Sharecropping gave landless families a plot in return for a share of the crop, often half; they bought food and supplies on credit against the harvest, so a poor year left them owing more than they earned.
Egypt
Egypt rode the wartime boom under Khedive Isma'il, who borrowed heavily from European bankers; when cheap American cotton returned, revenues collapsed and British and French creditors took control.
Q 24The word 'jeans' comes from the old French name for which Italian port, once a source of sturdy cotton twill?
Genoa
Genoa was 'Gênes' to the French, and English traders called the tough cloth it shipped 'jean'; only later did the name pass from the fabric to the trousers cut from it.
Q 25Which cotton-working device sat at the centre of the flag the Indian National Congress adopted in 1931?
A spinning wheel
A spinning wheel, the charkha, stood for Gandhi's call to make cloth at home instead of buying it from British mills; when India became independent in 1947 the Ashoka Chakra took its place on the flag.
Q 26What is the coarse hand-spun, hand-woven cloth that Gandhi promoted during India's freedom struggle called?
Khadi
Khadi was Gandhi's answer to imported mill cloth: he asked Indians to make and wear their own homespun as swadeshi, goods 'of one's own country', turning a plain fabric into a badge of the freedom movement.
Q 27The boll weevil crossed from Mexico into the United States in 1892 by which town near the Rio Grande's mouth?
Brownsville
Brownsville is near where the weevil crossed in 1892; within about thirty years it had infested the whole cotton South, collapsing land values and sending many farm workers north to factory cities.
Q 28The citizens of which Alabama town erected a monument to the boll weevil in 1919?
Enterprise
Enterprise, in Coffee County, unveiled its monument to the weevil in 1919, crediting the pest with forcing local farmers to diversify away from cotton into crops such as peanuts.
Q 29Denim takes its name from which French city?
Nîmes
Nîmes gave denim its name, from 'serge de Nîmes'; in 1873 the tailor Jacob Davis and his cloth supplier Levi Strauss patented metal rivets to stop the pockets of work trousers tearing.
Q 30In classic indigo denim, which yarns are dyed blue?
The warp only
The warp only is dyed with indigo, while the weft is left undyed, which is why jeans are blue on the outside and predominantly white on the inside.