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50 free Hobbies trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Every hobby has a vocabulary its outsiders never hear: birders who chase rarities, stamp and coin enthusiasts with Greek-rooted titles, knitters who grade yarn by the name of a Norfolk village, anglers with a word for the attendant who carries the net. This quiz is built from those words, and from the odd stories of how pastimes began: a GPS treasure hunt born the week a military signal was switched off, a puzzle craze that started with a map glued to a board, a writing challenge with a 50,000-word deadline. The 50 questions cover collectors and their names (philately, numismatics and stranger -ologies), the origins of popular pastimes from letterboxing to speed-solving, and the equipment and jargon of knitting, fishing, model building, gardening and collecting. Every answer comes with a one-line explanation that adds a fact the question left out. Play it to find out which hobbies you know from the inside, share it with the one friend who owns a label maker, or print it for a trivia night round.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which pursuit was dubbed the 'Hobby of Kings' in Renaissance times, when only the very wealthy could afford it?
Coin collecting
Coin collecting has since been promoted from the Hobby of Kings to the 'King of Hobbies', as one of the oldest and most popular pastimes in the world.
Q 02Deltiology, ranked the world's third-largest collecting hobby behind stamps and money, is the collecting of what?
Postcards
Postcards are what deltiologists collect, a name built on the Greek 'deltion', a small writing tablet, though it took twenty years to reach a dictionary.
Q 03In British birding slang, what is a birder called who travels long distances to tick off a rare bird?
Twitcher
Twitcher comes from the nervous behaviour of Howard Medhurst, a 1950s British birdwatcher; a twitcher who misses the bird has 'dipped out'.
Q 04Which GPS treasure hunt began on 3 May 2000, the day after the US stopped scrambling civilian satellite signals?
Geocaching
Geocaching's first cache was a black plastic bucket that Dave Ulmer part-buried in Beavercreek, Oregon, holding software, videos, books, money, a can of beans and a slingshot.
Q 05Pteridomania, a Victorian craze that put its motif on gravestones and christening gifts, was a fever for which plants?
Ferns
Ferns were the obsession, and Charles Kingsley coined 'pteridomania' in 1855 while teasing that daughters everywhere had been 'seized' by it.
Q 06An arctophile, whose hobby's name shares its Greek root with the word 'Arctic', collects which toys?
Teddy bears
Teddy bears are the arctophile's prize, and the toy itself is named after President Theodore Roosevelt, who loathed the nickname 'Teddy'.
Q 07What do vexillologists, whose discipline American scholar Whitney Smith named in 1957, study and collect?
Flags
Flags are vexillology's subject, the name fusing the Latin 'vexillum', a square banner carried by Roman cavalry, with the Greek '-logia'.
Q 08Oology, which a 1954 British Act of Parliament made impossible to practise legally, was the collecting of what?
Birds' eggs
Birds' eggs may be owned in the UK today only if taken before 1954 or under a scientific permit, and selling them is illegal whatever their age.
Q 09What did London cartographer John Spilsbury first produce around 1760, using a marquetry saw on a mounted map?
Jigsaw puzzle
Jigsaw puzzles began as 'dissected maps' for teaching geography; royal governess Lady Charlotte Finch used them on the children of George III.
Q 10Max Park's 3.13-second solve at Pride in Long Beach in 2023 set a then world record for which puzzle?
Rubik's Cube
Rubik's Cube speed-solving helped Park, who is autistic, develop his social and fine motor skills, and as of July 2026 he still held the 7×7 single and average records and the 6×6 single.
Q 11Which craft kit, devised by artist Dan Robbins for Max Klein's Detroit firm, has its archives at the Smithsonian?
Paint by number
Paint by number boxes promised 'a beautiful oil painting the first time you try', and a Massachusetts collector has since gathered over 6,000 finished works into a museum.
Q 12Which construction toy did Liverpool clerk Frank Hornby patent in 1901 under the name 'Mechanics Made Easy'?
Meccano
Meccano parts were at first bought in from outside makers, until demand outran supply and Hornby opened his own factory in Duke Street, Liverpool.
Q 13Which hobby led Terry Herbert to the largest Anglo-Saxon gold hoard ever found, on a Staffordshire farm in July 2009?
Metal detecting
Q 21What name did Philip Henry Gosse coin for the glass fish tank, after stocking London Zoo's first public one in 1853?
Aquarium
Aquarium welds Latin 'aqua' to '-arium', and Gosse's 1854 manual, The Aquarium, set off a Victorian craze for keeping sea creatures at home.
Q 22Gongoozlers, a word possibly from Lincolnshire dialect for staring, are people who enjoy watching what?
Canal boats
Canal boats are the gongoozler's spectacle, and the word also covers anyone who loves canal life without ever taking the tiller themselves.
Q 23Which term did Robert Stanley of the dealer Stanley Gibbons coin in 1970 to formalise the collecting of paper money?
Notaphily
Metal detecting paid off handsomely: Herbert and farmer Fred Johnson split the £3.285 million that two Midlands museums raised to buy the Staffordshire Hoard.
Q 14Which pastime did Sharon Burns and Tom Porter popularise in 1970s Britain, growing from 30 teams to 10,000 weekly?
Pub quiz
Pub quiz nights appear in print as early as 1959, but the leagues Burns and Porter founded across southern England in 1976 made them a fixture of British life.
Q 15Which pastime was born in a New York hotel room in 1962, when Raiders part-owner Bill Winkenbach drew up its rules?
Fantasy football
Fantasy football's first league, the GOPPPL, held its first draft at Winkenbach's Oakland home in August 1963 and was still running on its original scoring in 2015.
Q 16Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov was de facto curator of which collection at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology?
Butterflies
Butterflies obsessed Nabokov, who organised Harvard's collection as a research fellow in the 1940s and composed chess problems on the side.
Q 17Which book-sharing movement began in 2009 when Todd Bol built a model one-room schoolhouse in Hudson, Wisconsin?
Little Free Library
Little Free Library boxes passed 150,000 registered worldwide, and Bol built the first as a tribute to his late mother, a teacher who loved books.
Q 18Which British hobby took off from 1942, when Ian Allan's 'ABC' booklets listed the Southern Railway's locomotives?
Trainspotting
Trainspotting's devotees are also called anoraks in Britain and gunzels in Australia, while the ABC booklets began as a response to public requests for engine details.
Q 19Conchologists, whose hobby grew out of the Renaissance cabinets of curiosities, collect what?
Seashells
Seashells are the whole of conchology, while its parent science, malacology, studies the living mollusc as a complete organism.
Q 20Which Japanese word, slang since the Meiji era, describes buying books and letting them pile up unread?
Tsundoku
Tsundoku fuses 'tsunde-oku', to pile things up for later, with 'dokusho', reading books, so the guilty pile is built into the word itself.
Notaphily was a public-relations coinage meant to encourage a market the firm could serve, and banknote collecting only became a field of its own in the 1970s.
Q 24Which collectibles, issued from 1875 to stiffen packets, did Allen & Ginter print with actresses and boxers from 1879?
Cigarette cards
Cigarette cards from Allen & Ginter's 1879 sets also pictured baseball players, Native American chiefs, national flags and wild animals, and are counted among the very first cigarette cards.
Q 25Letterboxing, where walkers hunt hidden boxes and stamp a logbook, began in 1854 at Cranmere Pool on which moor?
Dartmoor
Dartmoor guide James Perrott left a bottle for visiting cards at Cranmere Pool, and the moor now holds thousands of boxes, many within a short walk of the road.
Q 26Which seven-piece Chinese dissection puzzle reached Western audiences around 1815 and set off a craze across Europe?
Tangram
Tangram sets had a second craze in Germany from 1891, when industrialist Friedrich Adolf Richter sold stone versions as 'The Anchor Puzzle'.
Q 27Which writing challenge, founded by Chris Baty in 1999 with 21 participants, set a 50,000-word target for November?
NaNoWriMo
NaNoWriMo's nonprofit shut down in March 2025 citing financial struggles and 'community vitriol', while the November challenge carried on through community-run alternatives such as NaNo 2.0.
Q 28Fourteen enthusiasts were charged with espionage at a Greek air base open day in 2001 while pursuing which hobby?
Plane spotting
Plane spotting at Kalamata looked like spying to Greek police; the twelve Britons and two Dutch faced up to 20 years in prison but were all acquitted on appeal a year later.
Q 29Which British firm made a promotional Ferguson tractor in 1949 and a Spitfire its first aircraft kit in 1953?
Airfix
Airfix chose its name so it would come first alphabetically in trade directories; the 1953 Spitfire Mk I was followed by a 1/72-scale Mk IX in 1958.
Q 30Which model-railway scale, 1:87, is the world's most popular, though Britain still prefers the slightly larger OO?
HO gauge
HO gauge means 'half O', being half the size of the older O scale, and it runs on the same 16.5 mm track that British OO uses.