Funerals
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40 free Funerals trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every culture has its own way of saying goodbye, and the details are stranger and more moving than most people expect. Funerals have featured brass bands, gun carriages, ships, rockets and coffins built to look like the things a person loved. This quiz covers the famous farewells that stopped whole countries, from royal and presidential state funerals to the send-offs of writers, actors and musicians. It also covers customs from around the world, the music played at the graveside, and the surprising origins of everyday funeral words. It suits anyone who likes history, world cultures and a good story, and it works well for a celebration of life, a trivia night or a quiet half hour of curiosity.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which actor paid to have writer Hunter S. Thompson's ashes fired from a cannon at a private funeral?
Johnny Depp
Johnny Depp funded the send-off for his close friend, with the cannon set on a 153-foot tower shaped like a double-thumbed fist.
Q 02After a Japanese cremation, relatives move the bones into an urn using which everyday utensil?
Chopsticks
Chopsticks are held by two relatives at once to lift each bone, which is why passing food between two pairs is taboo at Japanese tables.
Q 03At British state funerals, who traditionally pulls the gun carriage carrying the coffin in place of horses?
Sailors
Sailors stepped in at a royal funeral in 1901 when the horses broke away from the gun carriage at Windsor, and the emergency fix became the custom.
Q 04Which American city is famous for jazz funerals, in which a brass band leads the procession?
New Orleans
New Orleans funeral bands play sombre dirges and hymns on the march, then switch to upbeat tunes while onlookers join in and dance.
Q 05In a Tibetan sky burial, the body is left on a mountainside to be eaten mainly by which birds?
Vultures
Vultures are usually given the whole body, and the bones left behind are ground up with barley flour for the crows and hawks.
Q 06Which make of vehicle, customised to his own design, carried Prince Philip's coffin at his funeral?
Land Rover
Land Rover supplied the custom-built Defender hearse, which the Duke helped to design and which was finished in Edinburgh green.
Q 07Which British monarch left instructions for a white funeral, banning black drapes from the ceremony?
Queen Victoria
Queen Victoria disliked funereal black despite her decades in mourning dress, and she was laid in her coffin in a white dress and her wedding veil.
Q 08Which British admiral's body was shipped home in a cask of brandy for a state funeral?
Horatio Nelson
Horatio Nelson was killed at Trafalgar in 1805, and the cask holding his body was lashed to the mainmast of HMS Victory and put under guard.
Q 09Which science-fiction creator's ashes flew aboard Space Shuttle Columbia and later launched on a memorial rocket?
Gene Roddenberry
Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, became one of the first people to have their ashes carried into Earth orbit.
Q 10Which West African country is known for fantasy coffins built in shapes like a crab or an airliner?
Ghana
Ghana's Ga people around Accra commission coffins that often symbolise the dead person's profession, a craft that took off around 1950.
Q 11Which singer performed a reworked tribute song at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, in Westminster Abbey?
Elton John
Elton John reworked a song first written about Marilyn Monroe, and the single became the best-selling in UK chart history.
Q 12Which US president's funeral train carried him through seven states to Springfield, Illinois?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln's train covered 1,654 miles after funeral services and a lying in state had already been held in Washington, D.C.
Q 13Operation Hope Not was the code name for the state funeral plan of which British prime minister?
Winston Churchill
Q 21Which word names a funeral speech in praise of the dead, often confused with the mournful poem called an elegy?
Eulogy
Eulogy comes from the Greek eulogia, meaning praise, which joins eu, meaning well, to logia, meaning words.
Q 22The word hearse first described a spiked frame set over a coffin to hold which items?
Candles
Candles burned on the frame's spikes, which looked like the teeth of a harrow, the farm tool whose Latin name gave us the word hearse.
Q 23Which word for a monument to people buried elsewhere, like the one on London's Whitehall, means empty tomb?
Cenotaph
Cenotaph joins two Greek roots, and the Whitehall one, designed by Edwin Lutyens, replaced a wood-and-plaster version put up for a 1919 victory parade.
Winston Churchill's funeral was planned from 1953, after he suffered a stroke in office, and the plan waited twelve years to be used.
Q 14Which Virginia burial ground holds the eternal flame lit at President Kennedy's state funeral in 1963?
Arlington
Arlington National Cemetery saw his widow Jacqueline bring the flame to life with a taper at the end of the burial service.
Q 15Which of Alexander the Great's generals hijacked his funeral cart in Syria and took the body to Egypt?
Ptolemy
Ptolemy first buried the body at Memphis, and it was later transferred to Alexandria and reburied there.
Q 16Which composer died in 1791 leaving his Requiem, a mass for the dead, famously unfinished?
Mozart
Mozart had the piece on commission from a count who wanted it for a service in memory of his young wife, and it was completed by Süssmayr.
Q 17Which composer wrote the famous Funeral March that forms the third movement of his Piano Sonata No. 2?
Chopin
Chopin wrote the march at least two years before the rest of the sonata, and it was later performed at his own funeral.
Q 18Which bugle call, also used to signal lights out, is sounded at American military funerals?
Taps
Taps was arranged in its present form in 1862 by Union general Daniel Butterfield, whose version replaced an older French call.
Q 19In a military funeral procession, what is placed backwards in the stirrups of the riderless horse?
Boots
Boots reversed in the stirrups were seen at Ronald Reagan's funeral, where a horse named Sergeant York followed the coffin.
Q 20Named after the heavy cloth draped over a coffin, what are the people who carry it at a funeral called?
Pallbearers
Pallbearers take their name from the pall, and holding its ends at a funeral was once counted a tremendous honour.
Q 24Which word for a stone coffin comes from Greek words meaning flesh-eating?
Sarcophagus
Sarcophagus first named a kind of limestone that was thought to speed up the decay of the bodies laid inside it.
Q 25The word mausoleum comes from the tomb of Mausolus, a Wonder of the Ancient World in which city?
Halicarnassus
Halicarnassus is now Bodrum in Turkey, where the tomb was built for Mausolus and his sister-wife Artemisia.
Q 26In ancient Egyptian funerals, which vessels held the organs removed from the body during mummification?
Canopic jars
Canopic jars came in sets of four, but none was made for the heart, which stayed in the body as the seat of the soul.
Q 27Which Chinese emperor was buried near Xi'an with an army of thousands of life-size clay soldiers?
Qin Shi Huang
Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, was buried around 210 BCE, and local farmers stumbled on the figures in 1974.
Q 28In ancient Greek funerals, a coin was placed in the mouth of the dead to pay which mythical ferryman?
Charon
Charon carried souls across the river dividing the living from the dead, and his fee was a small coin called an obol.
Q 29Who delivered the funeral speech over Julius Caesar's body, showing the Roman crowd his blood-stained toga?
Mark Antony
Mark Antony was Caesar's lieutenant and consul that year, so he was the one chosen to preside over the ceremony.
Q 30In Homer's Iliad, which Greek hero holds funeral games in honour of his fallen friend Patroclus?
Achilles
Achilles has an echo in Virgil, whose hero Aeneas holds a similar competition on the anniversary of his father's death.