Finish the Phrase Trivia
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9correct to beat the crowd
94 free Finish the Phrase trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
55 free Finish the phrase trivia questions with answers. Finish the phrase trivia is the easiest game to run and the hardest to stop: read the first half of a saying and let people shout out the ending. This set gives you 34 classic proverbs to complete, from a bird in the hand and a stitch in time to sleeping dogs and the squeaky wheel, each with four multiple-choice endings so it works online, on a phone or read aloud at a party, a classroom or a seniors' activity hour. The second half of the quiz asks where the strangest phrases came from: why we bite the bullet, who first turned a blind eye, which Aesop fable gave us sour grapes, what curiosity originally did to the cat, and whose thunder was stolen at a performance of Macbeth. Those questions run harder, so mix and match by difficulty. Every ending and origin has been checked against a reference source rather than another trivia list, and where the true origin is unknown the question says so instead of repeating a myth. Looking for song endings? Try BrainPickle's song lyrics trivia instead.
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Q 01Which word completes the proverb "A bird in the hand is worth two in the ___"?
bush
Bush completes a proverb found in English since the 15th century; it may allude to falconry, where the hawk on the fist was worth more than any prey still loose.
Q 02Which word completes the proverb "A leopard cannot change its ___"?
spots
Spots is the Bible's own word: the Book of Jeremiah asks whether the Ethiopian can change his skin or the leopard his spots, meaning habitual wrongdoers will not reform.
Q 03Which word finishes the phrase "A penny saved is a penny ___"?
earned
Earned is not the word Benjamin Franklin printed: the saying is often credited to him, but his Poor Richard's Almanack had 'a penny saved is two pence clear'.
Q 04Which word finishes the phrase "A rolling stone gathers no ___"?
moss
Moss or no moss, the proverb named a famous band: Muddy Waters recorded a blues called Rollin' Stone in 1950, and the Rolling Stones took their name from it.
Q 05Which word finishes the phrase "A watched pot never ___"?
boils
Boils: Benjamin Franklin put a version of it, "a watched pot is slow to boil", into an account of waiting, very hungry, for a late breakfast.
Q 06Which word finishes the phrase "Absence makes the heart grow ___"?
fonder
Fonder, but only sometimes, warned La Rochefoucauld: absence dims small passions and feeds great ones, as the wind blows out a candle and fans a fire.
Q 07Which word finishes the phrase "An apple a day keeps the ___ away"?
doctor
Doctor has always been the target: the earliest known version, a Pembrokeshire rhyme printed in 1866, promised that an apple at bedtime would keep him from making his living.
Q 08Which word finishes the phrase "Beauty is in the eye of the ___"?
beholder
Beholder: the exact wording is credited to the Irish novelist Margaret Wolfe Hungerford in Molly Bawn (1878), though Shakespeare had said much the same in Love's Labour's Lost.
Q 09Which word finishes the phrase "Beggars cannot be ___"?
choosers
Choosers: John Heywood's Tudor proverb collection worded it 'beggers should be no choosers', a rule of manners before it became a plain statement of fact.
Q 10Which word finishes the phrase "Blood is thicker than ___"?
water
Water: a German beast epic of about 1180 already says kin-blood is not spoiled by water, and the modern "blood of the covenant" version has no historical record behind it.
Q 11Which word finishes the phrase "Cleanliness is next to ___"?
godliness
Godliness: John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, used the line in his sermon On Dress, telling his flock that slovenliness is no part of religion and neat clothes are a duty, not a sin.
Q 12Which word finishes the phrase "Discretion is the better part of ___"?
valour
Valour: Falstaff says the original, 'the better part of valour is discretion', in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, to excuse having played dead on the battlefield.
Q 13Which word finishes the phrase "Every cloud has a silver ___"?
lining
Lining: in John Milton's 1634 masque Comus a lady left alone in a wood at night sees a sable cloud turn forth her silver lining and takes heart from it.
Q 21Which word finishes the phrase "No man is an ___"?
island
Island: the line comes from a meditation John Donne wrote in 1623 while recovering from a near-fatal illness, and the same passage gave Hemingway the title For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Q 22Which word finishes the phrase "People who live in glass houses should not throw ___"?
stones
Stones: Chaucer's version in Troilus and Criseyde has no house in it, warning anyone with a head of glass to beware of flying stones.
Q 23Which word finishes the phrase "Out of sight, out of ___"?
mind
Mind: a much-told joke has an early translation computer turning this proverb into 'invisible idiot'.
Q 14Which word finishes the phrase "Familiarity breeds ___"?
contempt
Contempt: the saying is often given as the moral of Aesop's fable of the Fox and the Lion, where the fox is terrified at first sight but strolls up for a chat by the third meeting.
Q 15Which word finishes the phrase "Fortune favours the ___"?
bold
Bold: the admiral and writer Pliny the Elder reportedly quoted a Latin form of it as he steered toward erupting Vesuvius to help a friend, a voyage he did not survive.
Q 16Which word finishes the phrase "Honesty is the best ___"?
policy
Policy: the line is first found around 1600 in the English politician Sir Edwin Sandys, when policy also meant shrewdness, so the saying has a twist: honesty is the shrewdest course.
Q 17Which word finishes the phrase "It takes two to ___"?
tango
Tango: the phrase was made famous by a 1952 hit sung by Pearl Bailey, and thirty years later President Reagan used it of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Q 18Which word finishes the phrase "Look before you ___"?
leap
Leap: John Heywood's 1546 proverb book, a dialogue about whether to marry, gives it as advice 'in wedding and all things to look ere ye leap'.
Q 19Which word finishes the phrase "Many hands make light ___"?
work
Work shrinks when it is shared, says this one, while a rival proverb about too many cooks insists that extra helpers ruin everything.
Q 20Which word finishes the phrase "Necessity is the mother of ___"?
invention
Invention: the line is sometimes credited to Plato, but his Republic says only that our need will be the real creator; the proverb's wording was added by English translators.
Q 24Which word finishes the phrase "Strike while the iron is ___"?
hot
Hot is the whole point: a blacksmith can shape iron only in the moments after it leaves the forge, and once it cools the chance has gone.
Q 25Which word finishes the phrase "The pen is mightier than the ___"?
sword
Sword: in that exact wording it dates only to 1839, in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's play Richelieu; he is the same author who opened a novel with 'It was a dark and stormy night'.
Q 26Which word finishes the phrase "The squeaky wheel gets the ___"?
grease
Grease: this American proverb is often credited, without proof, to the humorist Josh Billings, and Japan has a proverb for the reverse, that the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.
Q 27Which word finishes the phrase "Too many cooks spoil the ___"?
broth
Broth: the picture is of every cook adding a little something to the pot until it tastes awful, and by 1575 it was already being quoted as a proverb.
Q 28Which word finishes the phrase "When in Rome, do as the ___ do"?
Romans
Romans: the advice is credited to Saint Ambrose, who told Augustine that he fasted on Saturdays in Rome but not in Milan, and to follow the custom of wherever he found himself.
Q 29Which word finishes the phrase "The grass is always greener on the other side of the ___"?
fence
Fence: the poet Ovid made the same complaint two thousand years ago, writing that the crop is always richer in another's field and the neighbour's herd gives more milk.
Q 30Before curiosity, which word was said to have killed the cat in the proverb?
Care
Care, meaning worry, was the original killer: Ben Jonson and Shakespeare both used the line, the idea being that worry would wear out even a cat's nine lives.