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50 free English Language trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This English language trivia quiz covers where the language came from and the odd facts it collected along the way. It starts with origins: the Angles who gave English its name, the West Germanic roots, the Old Norse words the Vikings left behind (they, sky, egg), the Norman Conquest and the French that makes up roughly 28 per cent of the lexicon, and the Great Vowel Shift that explains why English spelling looks nothing like its sounds. Then it turns to the books and people who fixed the language on paper: Beowulf, Chaucer, William Caxton's press, the King James Bible, Samuel Johnson's dictionary, Noah Webster's American spellings and the Oxford English Dictionary. The easy questions ask how many letters the alphabet has, which pangram typists know by heart, and what 'ghoti' is supposed to spell. The harder ones ask who coined the term Great Vowel Shift, how many senses the OED once gave the verb 'set', which letter became the 'Y' in 'ye olde', what the ampersand's name is a corruption of, and how many words Shakespeare is said to have used first. Our languages trivia quiz and literature trivia quiz are the neighbouring pages. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry for the language, the book or the dictionary before publishing, and the sentence that supports it is stored with each question.
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Q 01English is named after which Germanic people who migrated to Britain after Roman rule?
The Angles
The Saxons and Jutes came with them, and their dialects together became Old English.
Q 02To which branch of the Indo-European family does English belong?
West Germanic
That puts it alongside Dutch, German and Frisian rather than the Scandinavian languages.
Q 03English is the third most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese and which other?
Spanish
Counting second-language speakers, it is the most spoken language in the world.
Q 04Roughly how many English speakers worldwide did Ethnologue estimate as of 2021?
1.4 billion
There are more second-language speakers than native ones.
Q 05English is an official language of how many sovereign states?
57
Plus 30 dependent territories, making it the most geographically widespread language.
Q 06French dialects are the source of approximately what share of Modern English words?
28 per cent
Latin supplies a further 28 per cent, though the grammar and everyday vocabulary stay Germanic.
Q 07Modern English exists on a dialect continuum with which language?
Scots
After that it is closest to Low Saxon and Frisian.
Q 08Which pronouns did English take from Old Norse, replacing Anglo-Saxon forms with h-?
they, them, their
The older forms were hie, him and hera.
Q 09Which of these everyday words is an Old Norse loanword?
Egg
Give, get, sky, skirt and cake came the same way, usually displacing a native word.
Q 10Old English was spoken from about AD 450 until roughly which year?
1150
It is also called Anglo-Saxon and was first written in runes.
Q 11The Scandinavian-controlled region of northern and eastern England was called what?
The Danelaw
It followed the Great Heathen Army's invasion of 865 and seeded English with Norse words.
Q 12Which event of 1066 made Anglo-French the language of England's upper classes?
The Norman Conquest
English re-emerged afterwards as Middle English, soaked in French vocabulary.
Q 13The Great Vowel Shift took place primarily between which years?
1400 and 1700
Spelling was being standardised at the same time, which is why spellings now stray so far from sounds.
Q 21Roughly how many words did the first edition of Johnson's dictionary list?
42,773
His innovation was illustrating meanings with around 114,000 literary quotations from some 500 authors.
Q 22In which year did Noah Webster publish An American Dictionary of the English Language?
1828
He was seventy, and registered the copyright on April 14.
Q 23How many words did Webster's 1828 dictionary contain?
70,000
Twelve thousand of them had never appeared in a published dictionary before.
Q 24Webster changed the British '-re' ending to what in words such as 'center'?
Q 14Which Danish linguist coined the term 'Great Vowel Shift'?
Otto Jespersen
He did so in 1909 in A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles and drew the first diagram of it.
Q 15How many alliterative lines does the Old English epic Beowulf run to?
3,182
It survives in a single manuscript, the Nowell Codex.
Q 16How many stories make up Chaucer's Canterbury Tales?
24
Written in Middle English between 1387 and 1400, they are framed as a pilgrims' storytelling contest.
Q 17Who is thought to have introduced the printing press to England in 1476?
William Caxton
He was also England's first retailer of printed books.
Q 18The King James Bible, commissioned in 1604, was published in which year?
1611
It is an Early Modern English translation made for the Church of England and Church of Scotland.
Q 19How many words did Shakespeare use across his plays, sonnets and poems, per Warren King?
17,677
Of those, about 1,700 are said to have been first used by Shakespeare.
Q 20In which year was Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language published?
1755
It was prepared at 17 Gough Square, London, between 1746 and 1755.
-er
He also dropped the 'u' from colour and one 'l' from traveller.
Q 25In which year did the Oxford English Dictionary begin publication?
1884
Work had started in 1857, and the full dictionary was republished in 10 bound volumes in 1928.
Q 26The OED's 1989 second edition ran to how many volumes?
20
It comprised 21,728 pages; the third edition may never be printed at all.
Q 27Which short verb had the longest entry in the OED's second edition, with some 580 senses?
Set
The entry needed 60,000 words; 430 senses were for the bare verb.
Q 28Who became the OED's founding editor after being approached by Furnivall?
James Murray
He was reluctant to include scientific terms unless widely used.
Q 29Which element's name was notoriously left out of the OED in 1903 as too obscure?
Radium
Months later its discoverers, Pierre and Marie Curie, shared the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Q 30How many letters is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, the longest dictionary word?
45
It names a lung disease from very fine silica dust and was coined deliberately to be the longest word.