Currency Trivia
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185 free Currency trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
60 free currency trivia questions with answers. Sixty questions on currency, split roughly between the United States and the rest of the world. The US currency trivia covers who is on the $2 and $100 bills, when the big denominations were retired, why the penny went to zinc, what a nickel is really made of, the origin of the dollar sign and 'two bits', 'In God We Trust', the Mint, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and the dollar coins nobody wanted. The world round takes in the euro's name and symbol, the pound's claim to be the oldest currency in use, the seven-sided 50p, polymer notes, the loonie, the highest-valued unit on Earth, and the disasters: Weimar marks, the Hungarian pengő and Zimbabwe's 100-trillion-dollar note. Older history gets a look too, from Lydian electrum and Song-dynasty paper to cowrie shells, Yap's rai stones and the pig-shaped money boxes of Java. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the currencies, coins and events involved, and the sentence that establishes it is shown under each explanation. Play solo or use it as a money round for a pub quiz or classroom.
30 of 185 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which symbol sits at the top of the pyramid on the back of the US one-dollar bill?
An eye
An eye, the Eye of Providence, floats above a pyramid of 13 steps, one for each original state. It began as a Christian symbol of a watchful God; Freemasons adopted it only after the seal was designed in 1782.
Q 02Sterling, the money of the United Kingdom, holds which record?
Oldest still in continuous use
Oldest still in continuous use: sterling goes back to Anglo-Saxon silver pennies, 240 of which were meant to weigh a pound of silver, which is how a unit of weight became a unit of money.
Q 03Since 1971 the pound has been divided into how many pence?
100 pence
100 pence replaced the old 240 on Decimal Day, 15 February 1971. The switch was years in the making: the first decimal coins had been in circulation since 1968.
Q 04Which of these countries swapped its national cash for euro notes and coins on 1 January 2002?
Portugal
Portugal was one of twelve countries that changed their cash together, on a scale never tried before. The euro itself was already three years old, but until then it had existed only as 'book money'.
Q 05Currency traders call the pound-to-dollar exchange rate by which nickname, after the transatlantic line that once carried it?
Cable
Cable recalls the telegraph line laid under the Atlantic in 1866, which carried sterling prices between London and New York; traders kept the nickname long after fibre optics replaced it.
Q 06The euro sign € is based on which Greek letter?
Epsilon
Epsilon echoes the first letter of 'Europe', the EU says, and the two parallel lines drawn through it stand for the stability of the currency.
Q 07In 2026, which currency had the highest value per unit in the world?
Kuwaiti dinar
The Kuwaiti dinar buys more than three US dollars, ahead of the Bahraini dinar at about $2.65. Iraqi troops looted its banknotes in the 1990 invasion, so Kuwait voided the series and issued a new one.
Q 08The Swiss franc is legal tender in Switzerland and which other country?
Liechtenstein
Liechtenstein used the Austrian krone until that currency collapsed after the First World War, then switched to the Swiss franc and tied its customs and its money to Switzerland.
Q 09India's rupee sign ₹, adopted in 2010, blends a Latin capital R with a letter from which script?
Devanagari
Devanagari supplies the letter 'ra'; the two strokes across the top are meant to recall India's tricolour flag and an equals sign. Designer D. Udaya Kumar's entry beat more than 3,000 others.
Q 10Which US agency was founded in 1865 to stamp out counterfeit money?
The Secret Service
The Secret Service began inside the Treasury, when nearly a third of the money in circulation was fake; it took on guarding presidents only after William McKinley was assassinated in 1901.
Q 11Which bird appears on the reverse of Canada's one-dollar coin?
Common loon
The common loon gave the coin its nickname, the loonie, almost at once. The coin arrived in 1987 as a cost-saving swap for the dollar bill, and its two-dollar successor duly became the 'toonie'.
Q 12Modern polymer banknotes were first issued as currency in which country, in 1988?
Australia
Australia issued the first polymer note, a $10 marking its 1988 bicentenary, developed by the Reserve Bank with the CSIRO; plastic lasts longer than paper and is much harder to counterfeit.
Q 13Which British coin, introduced in 1969, was the world's first with seven sides?
The 50p
The 50p is an equilateral-curve heptagon: its constant width lets it roll through vending machines like a round coin, yet it is easy to tell from other coins by sight and by feel.
Q 21Which president appears on the US $2 bill?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson's note is still issued by the Federal Reserve as one of its current denominations, yet many people assume it was withdrawn years ago.
Q 22Why did the US Treasury stop printing the $2 bill in 1966?
Low demand
Low demand, the Treasury said. Ten years later it revived the note, reckoning that one $2 bill could do the work of two singles.
Q 23'In God We Trust' first appeared in 1864 on which short-lived US coin?
The two-cent piece
The two-cent piece got the motto after a Pennsylvania minister wrote to the Treasury in 1861 asking that Union coins recognise God; the coin itself lasted only until 1873.
Q 14In Australia's 1966 switch to decimal money, one new dollar replaced ten of which old unit?
Shillings
Shillings: ten made a dollar, so each old pound became two. A cartoon character called Dollar Bill fronted the publicity campaign that taught Australians the new sums.
Q 15Which building appears on the reverse of the US five-cent coin?
Monticello
Monticello was Thomas Jefferson's own design for his Virginia home; on the nickel, competition winner Felix Schlag was made to submit an entirely new drawing of it before the coin went into production in 1938.
Q 16US paper money earned the nickname 'greenbacks' during which war?
The Civil War
The Civil War pushed the Union to issue Demand Notes in 1861 to pay its bills; their green-inked backs gave the nickname, and like every US note since they are still legally worth face value.
Q 17The Spanish dollar had eight reales, so what nickname does a US quarter carry?
Two bits
A 'bit' was one real, an eighth of a Spanish dollar, so a quarter dollar was two bits, a phrase kept alive by 'shave and a haircut, two bits'.
Q 18The dollar sign $ is thought to have grown out of a handwritten abbreviation for which currency?
Pesos
Pesos were written 'ps' in ledgers; in manuscripts of the late 1700s the s creeps over the p until the pair looks like $, which is the most widely accepted of several theories.
Q 19Whose portrait is on the US $100 bill?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin never served as president, but he knew paper money first-hand: his print shop produced notes for the colonies, using anti-counterfeiting tricks he had devised himself.
Q 20Since July 1969, what has been the largest US bill still being issued?
The $100
The $100 became the top note when the Fed and Treasury dropped the $500 to $10,000 bills for lack of use; none had been printed since 1945, and the survivors are still legal tender.
Q 24'In God We Trust' first appeared on a US bill in 1957. Which one?
The $1 silver certificate
Congress had made the phrase the national motto the year before.
Q 25Why does a US $100 bill last over three times as long as a $1 bill?
It is saved, not spent
It is saved, not spent: the Federal Reserve says hundreds are often held as a store of value and change hands rarely, so one lasts over twenty years against about seven for a hard-worked single.
Q 26US banknotes marked with a small 'FW' were printed in which city?
Fort Worth
Fort Worth has printed US currency since December 1990, at a second plant built as a backup to Washington and to shorten the haul to the western Federal Reserve Banks.
Q 27Which cryptocurrency was launched in 2013 as a joke about the hype around digital coins?
Dogecoin
Dogecoin borrowed its name and its dog mascot from an internet meme; the joke got out of hand, and in May 2021 the coins were briefly worth more than $85 billion.
Q 28US Federal Reserve Notes are printed on paper made mostly from what?
Cotton fibre
Cotton fibre makes up three-quarters of the paper and linen the rest; tiny red and blue threads are scattered through it at random to make the sheet harder to imitate.
Q 29Why did the US Mint switch the penny to a zinc core in 1982?
Copper had become too expensive
Copper had become too expensive for a one-cent coin, so the Mint switched to copper-plated zinc. Costs kept climbing anyway: by 2025 a penny cost 3.69 cents to make, and striking for circulation stopped.
Q 30What is the modern US five-cent coin made of?
75% copper, 25% nickel
75% copper, 25% nickel has been the recipe since 1866, with one break: from 1942 to 1945 nickel was a strategic war material, so 'war nickels' were struck in a silver alloy instead.