Etymology Trivia
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174 free Etymology trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This etymology trivia quiz is about where words come from: the people, places, myths and foreign tongues hiding inside everyday English. The easy questions are the famous eponyms and loanwords: the earl behind the sandwich, the Czech play that gave us robot, the atoll that named the bikini, the Persian chess phrase behind checkmate and the goddess inside cereal. From there it gets harder: the Venetian forty days of quarantine, the mouse in muscle, the salt in salary, the fig-revealer sycophant, the painted porch of the Stoics, the Massachusetts governor turned gerrymander, the finance minister who became a silhouette, the Ottawa word behind chipmunk, the Taíno roots of hammock and barbecue, the Hindi origins of shampoo and pyjamas, the Yiddish glitch and the Japanese tycoon. There are also questions on the vocabulary of etymology itself: eponyms, portmanteaus, back-formations, folk etymology and loanwords. If you want the wider science of language, our Linguistics quiz covers that ground. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry for the word, person or place in question before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question.
30 of 174 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Greek root of 'etymology', etymos, means what?
True
True: etymos meant 'true' or 'real', since Greek thinkers held that a word's origin revealed its true sense; lacking historical records, their own derivations were mostly guesswork.
Q 02What is the term for a noun after which something is named, like Elizabeth I for the Elizabethan era?
Eponym
An eponym can even name a stretch of time: the Assyrians named each year after a high official as early as the second millennium BC.
Q 03Which author first used 'portmanteau' for a blended word like smog or motel?
Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll: in Through the Looking-Glass (1871) Humpty Dumpty explains 'slithy' as two meanings packed into one word, like a two-compartment portmanteau suitcase.
Q 04Which Oxford English Dictionary editor coined the term 'back-formation', citing 'burgle' from 'burglar'?
James Murray
James Murray, the Oxford English Dictionary's chief editor from 1879, introduced 'back-formation' in its own entry for 'burgle', a verb that had only recently been carved out of the older noun 'burglar'.
Q 05The word 'loanword' is itself an example of what?
A calque
A calque: 'loanword' is a word-for-word translation of German Lehnwort, while 'calque' itself, fittingly, is a loanword from French.
Q 06The Earl of Sandwich reputedly ate meat between bread to avoid leaving what?
Gaming table
Gaming table: the tale comes from a foreign visitor's account of London in the 1770s, where a gambling statesman eats beef between toast rather than stop play; the book never names John Montagu, the 4th Earl.
Q 07The word 'boycott' comes from a land agent shunned in which country in 1880?
Ireland
Ireland: Captain Charles Boycott, land agent for Lord Erne in County Mayo, was shunned by Land League tenants in 1880, and his surname became the word within months.
Q 08What does 'quarantine' literally mean, from the Italian word quarantena?
Forty days
Forty days: plague-era Italian ports kept arriving ships waiting a quarantena, a spell of forty days, before anyone could land; the word already named forty-day periods of fasting and penance.
Q 09Which word did Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. give the world, from the Czech for 'forced labour'?
Robot
Robot: the play fills a factory with manufactured workers, and Čapek credited his brother Josef with suggesting the name, from robota, the forced labour serfs once owed their lords.
Q 10Which poet coined 'pandemonium' as the name of the capital of Hell?
John Milton
John Milton: in Paradise Lost the fallen angels raise Pandaemonium, 'all demons', as the palace where Satan holds council; the wild uproar we now call pandemonium is a later, figurative sense.
Q 11Most reference works trace 'OK' to a late-1830s abbreviation fad in which city?
Boston
Boston: the Morning Post printed 'o.k.' for 'oll korrect' in March 1839 as a joke, and it outlived the fad because Martin Van Buren, nicknamed Old Kinderhook, used O.K. as a slogan in his 1840 re-election campaign.
Q 12The bikini was named after an atoll where what had happened four days earlier?
A public nuclear bomb test
A public nuclear bomb test: the US set off the Able bomb at Bikini Atoll on 1 July 1946, and Louis Réard borrowed the name for a swimsuit so skimpy that a Paris showgirl, not a fashion model, wore it at the launch.
Q 13Some dictionaries trace the 'mate' in checkmate to a Persian phrase meaning what?
Q 21Which word for self-love comes from a youth who pined for his own reflection?
Narcissism
Narcissism: in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Narcissus cannot tear himself away from his reflection in a pool and dies beside it, and a narcissus flower springs up on the spot.
Q 22The mausoleum takes its name from the tomb of King Mausolus at which ancient city?
Halicarnassus
Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum): the tomb built around 350 BC for Mausolus, satrap of Caria, by his widow Artemisia was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
Q 23Which Athenian lawgiver's harsh code gave English a word for severe laws?
Draco
Draco: his code of about 621 BC was said to punish even trivial offences with death, giving us 'draconian'; by tradition Solon later repealed all of it except the law on homicide.
The king is helpless
The king is helpless: on this reading Persian shāh māt has māt as 'at a loss' or 'defeated'; the better-known gloss 'the king is dead' takes the word for Arabic māta, 'he died'.
Q 14Which English word derives from the name of the Roman goddess Ceres?
Cereal
Cereal comes from Latin cerealis, 'of Ceres', the Roman goddess of grain and the harvest; ceramic, cerebral and ceremony share only the spelling.
Q 15Which English word derives from the name of the goat-legged Greek god Pan?
Panic
Panic comes from Greek panikon, 'of Pan': the goat-legged god was believed to cause sudden groundless fear in flocks and travellers; panorama, pandemic and pantry merely share the spelling.
Q 16Which month is named after the two-faced Roman god of doorways?
January
January: Janus, the two-faced Roman god of doorways and beginnings, was shown looking both ways at once, a fitting patron for the month the Romans came to count as the start of the year.
Q 17Thursday is the Germanic equivalent of the Roman day named for which god?
Jupiter
Jupiter: Latin dies Iovis, 'Jupiter's day', survives in French jeudi and Italian giovedì; Germanic peoples swapped in their own thunder god Thunor (Thor), giving Thursday.
Q 18Which English weekday is named after the god the Norse called Odin?
Wednesday
Wednesday: Old English Wōdnesdæg, 'Woden's day', uses the Anglo-Saxon name for Odin; it was a translation of the Roman 'day of Mercury', which is why the French say mercredi.
Q 19Which English word derives from the name of the Roman god Vulcan?
Volcano
Volcano: Vulcan was the Roman god of fire and the forge, and the Romans pictured his workshop smoking beneath fiery mountains such as Etna and the island still called Vulcano.
Q 20Which ocean's name goes back to the Titan who held up the heavens?
Atlantic
Atlantic: Greek Atlantikos, 'of Atlas', at first meant only the sea off north-west Africa, beyond the mountains where the Titan was said to hold up the heavens; the name spread to the whole ocean much later.
Q 24The word 'ostracism' derives from what?
Pottery sherds used as voting tokens
Pottery sherds used as voting tokens: each citizen scratched a name on an ostrakon, a broken piece of pottery, and the man with the most votes was banished for ten years.
Q 25Which word for a flatterer comes from Greek for 'one who shows the fig'?
Sycophant
Sycophant: Greek sykophantēs first meant an informer; one old story has them denouncing fig smugglers, another points to a rude hand gesture called the fig, and neither is proven.
Q 26The Greek root of 'sarcasm' means what?
To tear flesh
To tear flesh: Greek sarkazein, from sarx, 'flesh', meant to strip off the flesh as a dog would, then to bite the lip in rage, and finally to sneer, the sense English borrowed.
Q 27The word 'academy' comes from the grove of Akademos, where which Greek philosopher founded his school?
Plato
Plato: he taught in a grove named for Akademos, a hero of Greek legend, so every academy since carries the name of an obscure mythical figure instead of its famous founder.
Q 28Stoicism takes its name from what feature of the agora where Zeno of Citium taught?
A painted porch
A painted porch: Zeno taught around 300 BC in the Stoa Poikile, the 'Painted Porch', a colonnade hung with battle scenes on the north side of the agora, so his followers were called Stoics.
Q 29The word 'lyceum' comes from a gymnasium beside Apollo's sanctuary where which philosopher founded his school?
Aristotle
Aristotle: he set up his school among the covered walks of the Lyceum, a public gymnasium named for the neighbouring sanctuary of Apollo Lykeios, and the name later passed to schools and lecture halls.
Q 30'Muscle' comes from Latin musculus, the diminutive of what animal?
Mouse
Mouse: Latin musculus means 'little mouse', from mus; a flexing biceps was thought to look like a mouse moving under the skin, and Greek mys likewise meant both.