Grammar Trivia
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125 free Grammar trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
44 free Grammar trivia questions with answers. Grammar arguments never end, and this quiz collects the best of them. It covers the parts of speech and moods, the great usage feuds (the Oxford comma lawsuit, the split infinitive, prepositions at the end of sentences, fewer versus less, singular they), the punctuation marks and their inventors (Aldus Manutius's semicolon, Speckter's interrobang, the ampersand as 27th letter), and the wordplay: palindromes, pangrams, contronyms, portmanteaus, garden-path sentences and the eight-word Buffalo sentence. Easy questions are for anyone who remembers school English. Harder ones ask who first proposed the fewer/less rule, what the upside-down interrobang is called, which Finnish word is the longest palindrome, and which linguist took Strunk and White apart. It suits a teachers' lounge, a word-nerd party or a general-knowledge round. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the constructions, marks and books involved, and each question carries its source.
30 of 125 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Traditional grammar divides English words into how many parts of speech?
Eight
Traditional school grammar counts eight parts of speech, among them noun, verb, adjective and preposition; modern grammars add determiners and divide the classes differently.
Q 02Which part of speech expresses emotion, as in 'oops'?
An interjection
An interjection such as 'oops' voices a sudden feeling and can stand alone as a complete utterance; the name comes from Latin for 'thrown between', because it is tossed into speech without joining a sentence's grammar.
Q 03In 'Swimming is fun', the -ing word acts as a noun; what is that verb form called?
A gerund
A gerund is an -ing form doing a noun's job, as in 'Swimming is fun'; put the same word before a noun, as in 'a swimming fish', and traditional grammar calls it a participle instead.
Q 04'Went' was originally the past tense of which verb before it was borrowed by 'go'?
Wend
Wend, meaning to make one's way, gave up 'went' to 'go' by about 1500 and now has only 'wended' as its past tense; linguists call a verb borrowing its forms this way suppletion.
Q 05'The cake was eaten by the dog' is in which grammatical voice?
The passive voice
The passive voice makes the receiver of the action the subject and lets the doer vanish altogether, which is why 'mistakes were made' is a stock way to admit an error without saying who made it.
Q 06Which mood does the verb 'were' show in 'If I were the teacher'?
The subjunctive
The subjunctive is the mood for hypothetical or wished-for situations, which is why 'were' replaces 'was' after 'if I'; fixed phrases such as 'God save the King' and 'heaven forbid' preserve it.
Q 07Which of these auxiliary verbs is one of English's nine core modals?
Must
Must is one of the nine core modals, with can, could, may, might, shall, should, will and would; unlike be, do and have, a modal never takes an -s ending, so nobody says 'she musts'.
Q 08The serial comma takes its nickname from which publishing house, whose printer Horace Hart prescribed it?
Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press lent the comma its nickname late: Horace Hart's rulebook called for the mark without naming it, and 'Oxford comma' is first recorded only in 1978, in a history of the press.
Q 09A missing comma in a Maine law won dairy drivers a 2017 appeals ruling about what?
Overtime pay
Overtime pay was at stake: Maine's law exempted 'packing for shipment or distribution', and with no comma after 'shipment' the judges could not tell whether distributing was exempt, so the drivers won.
Q 10The Star Trek phrase 'to boldly go' is the classic example of what?
A split infinitive
A split infinitive wedges an adverb between 'to' and its verb, as in 'to boldly go'; English writers have done it since the 1300s, and grammarians only began condemning it in the 1800s.
Q 11The quip 'up with which I will not put' mocks which supposed rule?
Never end a sentence with a preposition
'Never end a sentence with a preposition' is the rule the quip mocks; it is often credited to Winston Churchill, but its earliest known printings, in the early 1940s, do not mention him.
Q 12Which poet laureate's 1672 complaint about a Ben Jonson phrase made preposition-stranding a grammatical sin?
John Dryden
John Dryden faulted a Ben Jonson line in 1672 for ending in a preposition; he had stranded prepositions himself, and later went back through his own prose removing them.
Q 13The word apostrophe comes from Greek meaning what?
Q 21The palindrome 'Able was I ere I saw Elba' was implausibly attributed to whom?
Napoleon
The line was implausibly attributed to Napoleon, exiled on Elba in 1814; it was actually coined by a certain 'J.T.R.' in 1848, a century before 'A man, a plan, a canal – Panama'.
Q 22Guinness lists the 19-letter saippuakivikauppias as the longest known palindromic word; which language is it from?
Finnish
Finnish supplies the longest known palindromic word, a 19-letter compound for a kind of dealer; English's longest in the Oxford English Dictionary is tattarrattat, James Joyce's word in Ulysses for a knock at a door.
Q 23Which musician's song 'Bob' is composed entirely of palindromes?
'Weird Al' Yankovic
Turning away or elision
Turning away or elision is the sense of Greek apostrophos, since the mark shows where a letter has dropped out; even the possessive 's began that way, as a shortened -es ending.
Q 14What is the superfluous mark in market signs like 'apple's 50p' commonly called?
The greengrocers' apostrophe
The greengrocers' apostrophe is a stray apostrophe in a plural, and the scorn is not only English: Germans call their own misplaced apostrophes the Deppenapostroph, or 'idiot's apostrophe'.
Q 15The semicolon first appears in a 1496 book by Pietro Bembo, printed by which Venetian printer?
Aldus Manutius
Aldus Manutius printed Bembo's De Aetna in 1496 with the first semicolon; his press also introduced italic type in 1501 and the pocket-sized octavo book.
Q 16What is Project Semicolon?
An anti-suicide initiative and tattoo
An anti-suicide initiative and tattoo, Project Semicolon was founded by Amy Bleuel in 2013: a semicolon is used where an author could have ended a sentence but chose not to, and supporters wear the mark as a tattoo.
Q 17Martin Speckter proposed the interrobang in 1962 because he wanted one mark for surprised questions in what?
Advertising copy
Advertising copy was Speckter's trade: he ran a New York ad agency and disliked seeing surprised questions end in two marks, so he proposed one in the magazine Type Talks; Remington offered a key for it in 1968.
Q 18What is the upside-down interrobang called?
Gnaborretni
The inverted interrobang is the gnaborretni, 'interrobang' spelled backwards; it opens sentences in languages that use inverted question and exclamation marks, and Unicode gives it its own code point.
Q 19The name ampersand comes from schoolchildren slurring which phrase?
'And per se and'
'And per se and' was how children ended the alphabet, meaning '& by itself is and', and the phrase slurred into ampersand.
Q 20The ampersand symbol began as a ligature of the two letters of which Latin word?
Et
Et is Latin for 'and': scribes ran the e and the t together until they fused into &, which is why '&c.' is an old way of writing etc. and some typefaces still show both letters.
'Weird Al' Yankovic wrote 'Bob' for his 2003 album Poodle Hat as a Bob Dylan pastiche in which every line, like the title, reads the same backwards; its video parodies Dylan's 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' film.
Q 24'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' is the best-known example of what?
A pangram
'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' is a pangram, a sentence containing every letter of the alphabet, which is why typewriter tests and font samples use it.
Q 25'Jumbo shrimp' and 'deafening silence' are examples of which figure of speech?
An oxymoron
An oxymoron yokes two contradictory words, and the term is one itself: it comes from Greek roots meaning 'sharp' and 'dull', or 'pointedly foolish'.
Q 26A word like 'dust', which can mean both to remove dust and to add it, is called what?
A contronym
A contronym carries two opposite meanings; 'cleave' can mean split or cling because two different Old English verbs, one for each sense, ended up spelled the same.
Q 27A word with two opposite meanings, such as 'cleave', is nicknamed after which Roman god?
Janus
Janus, the Roman god of gates and doorways, was shown with two faces looking in opposite directions, so a word that points both ways at once, like 'cleave' for split and cling, is a Janus word.
Q 28Which pronoun did Merriam-Webster name Word of the Year in 2019?
They
They was Merriam-Webster's 2019 pick as its use for a single nonbinary person spread; the American Dialect Society had honoured that same use in 2015 and went on to name it Word of the Decade.
Q 29Which Latin abbreviation introduces an example?
e.g.
Writers use e.g., short for exempli gratia or 'for example', to bring in instances; i.e., from id est or 'that is', restates the point instead, so swapping the two changes what a sentence claims.
Q 30A grammatical sentence made of eight repetitions of one word uses the name of which city?
Buffalo
Buffalo works as a city name, a noun for bison and a verb meaning to bully, so the sentence says that bison from the city bully other bison there; Dmitri Borgmann printed an early version in 1967.