Money Trivia
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168 free Money trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This money trivia quiz is about money in the broadest sense: where the word comes from, what people have used as cash through history, the coins and notes that became legends, the slang we use for it, the gold it was backed by, the ways it has been stolen, taxed and given away, and the characters (real and cartoon) famous for hoarding it. The easy questions are ones most people know: what a buck is, what Monopoly is based on, why Fort Knox is famous, and which coin is flipped 'heads or tails'. From there it gets harder: Juno Moneta's temple, tally sticks and the fire that burned Parliament, the Templars' letters of credit, denarii and sestertii, the widow's mite and Charon's obol, the guinea's 21 shillings, the farthing's wren, the 1933 double eagle that sold for $18.9 million, Krugerrands and sovereigns, Operation Bernhard, the Great Train Robbery, Brink's-Mat, the window tax, Danegeld, Pacioli's Rule of 72, the Welcome Stranger nugget, the Klondike stampede, Mansa Musa and the first billionaire. If you want exchange rates and banknote design, our Currency quiz covers that; for markets and banking, try Finance. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for the coins, people, events and customs named before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question.
30 of 168 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'money' comes from the Latin moneta, linked to the temple of which goddess?
Juno
Rome's mint stood at the temple of Juno Moneta on the Capitoline.
Q 02Which function of money lets purchasing power be saved and spent later?
Store of value
Store of value is the function inflation erodes: when prices climb quickly, money saved for later buys less, which pushes people to spend it fast or hoard goods instead.
Q 03Accounting records more than 7,000 years old, predating coins, have been found where?
Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia's clay tokens, used to keep count of grain and livestock, go back more than 7,000 years, and one much-debated theory holds that marking them on clay tablets grew into cuneiform.
Q 04Sweden's 17th-century 'plate money', which weighed up to almost 20 kilos apiece, was made of what?
Large slabs of copper
Large slabs of copper stood in for small silver coins because copper was worth so much less; their awkwardness helped prompt a Stockholm bank to issue Europe's first banknotes.
Q 05The 'heads' side of a coin is formally called what?
Obverse
The obverse is nicknamed heads because it usually carries a ruler's portrait, while tails, used of coins since the 1680s, simply means the opposite end.
Q 06The Romans called coin flipping navia aut caput, meaning what?
Ship or head
Navia aut caput means 'ship or head': early Roman bronze asses showed the two-faced god Janus on one side and a ship's prow on the other.
Q 07Which US city's name was decided by an 1845 coin toss, with the coin later put on display in a museum?
Portland, Oregon
Portland, Oregon: Francis Pettygrove, from Portland, Maine, won two of three tosses against Asa Lovejoy, who wanted to name the settlement Boston.
Q 08Which 14th-century Italian poet is credited as the first coin collector of the Renaissance?
Petrarch
Petrarch wrote that vineyard diggers kept bringing him old coins to buy or identify, and he once gave Emperor Charles IV a set of Roman coins.
Q 09What is the study and collecting of coins called?
Numismatics
Numismatics comes from Greek nomisma, 'coin', a word rooted in nomos, 'custom' or 'law': Aristotle argued that money earned the name because it exists by convention, not by nature.
Q 10Which edge motto on Britain's round pound coins means 'an ornament and a safeguard'?
Decus et Tutamen
Decus et Tutamen, 'an ornament and a safeguard', was first lettered on the edge of Charles II's 1662 crown to deter clipping and later on the 1983 pound coin.
Q 11The 'plugged nickel' of the saying was a coin tampered with how?
Its core swapped for base metal
Its core swapped for base metal: cheats punched or sawed a plug of good metal out of a coin and filled the hole with something cheap, so a plugged coin was one nobody would take.
Q 12Which everyday word for money originally meant a 'money box'?
Cash
Cash arrived in the 1590s from French caisse, 'money box', from Latin capsa, 'box'; the name slid from the container to the coins inside, its only meaning by the 18th century.
Q 13'Bankruptcy' comes from the Italian banca rotta, literally a moneylender's broken what?
Bench
Q 21Which modern words for money descend from 'denarius'?
Dinero and dinheiro
Dinero and dinheiro, Spanish and Portuguese for money, both descend from Latin denarius, as do Italian denaro and the Arabic dinar; dollar and thaler come instead from the Bohemian mining town of Joachimsthal.
Q 22Which Roman coin's name means 'two and a half', its original value in asses?
Sestertius
Sestertius joins semis, 'half', and tertius, 'third': two whole asses and half of a third, a sum the Romans wrote as IIS, which is why the coin is abbreviated HS.
Q 23Which emperor replaced the Roman aureus with the long-lived gold solidus?
Constantine
Bench: Italian moneylenders did business from a banca, a bench or counter, and banca rotta was a broken one; the tale that a failed banker's bench was smashed in public is doubted.
Q 14The word 'salary' comes from Latin salarium, a term connected to which commodity?
Salt
Salary derives from Latin salarium, a Roman soldier's allowance, formed from sal, 'salt'; how far the allowance was actually paid in salt is debated, but the root is not.
Q 15Which is the world's oldest surviving bank, founded in 1472?
Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena
Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena began in 1472 as a Monte Pio, a charitable pawn agency for Siena's poor, and only later grew into a commercial bank; Berenberg (1590) is the oldest merchant bank.
Q 16Which medieval order issued letters of credit to pilgrims, an early form of banking?
Knights Templar
The Knights Templar let pilgrims deposit valuables at a Templar house in Europe and draw funds in the Holy Land against a letter of credit, an early cheque system.
Q 17On a medieval split tally stick, what was the longer part held by the lender called?
Stock
The lender kept the longer piece, called the stock; the shorter foil went to the borrower, and the matching grain and notches proved the debt.
Q 18In 1834, burning old Exchequer tally sticks in a furnace accidentally destroyed which London landmark?
The Houses of Parliament
The Houses of Parliament burned down after a cartload or two of old tally sticks overheated the furnaces under the House of Lords; the Gothic palace that replaced them was designed by Charles Barry.
Q 19Wampum's purple beads were cut from which New England shellfish?
Quahog clam
Quahog clam shells gave the more valuable purple beads and whelks the white ones; coin-starved colonists then adopted wampum as money for their own trade.
Q 20The Roman denarius takes its name from a Latin word meaning what?
Containing ten
Denarius means 'containing ten' because the coin was first worth ten bronze asses; it was retariffed to sixteen asses around 141 BC.
Constantine struck the solidus at 72 to the Roman pound; its name became Late Latin soldum, 'pay', which is why a man who serves for pay is a soldier.
Q 24In the Bible, which king's yearly income of gold weighed 666 talents?
Solomon
Solomon's haul, in 1 Kings 10, left him drinking only from gold cups, and the text says he made silver as common as stones in Jerusalem.
Q 25In the Gospels, whose two tiny coins did Jesus say outweighed the gifts of the rich?
A widow
A widow's two lepta, the 'widow's mite', added up to one quadrans, Rome's smallest coin; Jesus said the rich gave from their surplus while she gave all she had to live on.
Q 26Judas's thirty pieces of silver were used to buy what, according to Matthew?
A potter's field
A potter's field was bought by the chief priests to bury strangers in, because blood money could not go back into the treasury; paupers' burial grounds have been called potter's fields ever since.
Q 27In Greek custom, a coin was placed in the mouth of the dead to pay which ferryman of the underworld?
Charon
Charon took the coin, a small-change obol, as his fare across the river; in Virgil's Aeneid the unburied dead, whom he turns away, must roam the shore for a hundred years.
Q 28Which name did medieval Western Europe give the gold coins of Constantinople, still used in heraldry for a gold disc?
Bezant
Bezant comes from Byzantium; when the old coin had been debased almost to nothing, Alexios I Komnenos replaced it in 1092 with the purer hyperpyron, which Western merchants went on calling a bezant.
Q 29Which flower, stamped on Florence's gold florin, gave the coin its name?
Lily
The lily made the coin a fiorino, from fiore, 'flower'; first struck in 1252 with John the Baptist on the other side, it was copied across Europe and lives on in the name of Hungary's forint.
Q 30The gold ducat originated in which city in 1284?
Venice
Venice launched the gold ducat in 1284 after the imperial gold coins its merchants relied on were debased, then kept the design unchanged for over 500 years, until Napoleon ended the republic.