Nerd Trivia
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100 free Nerd trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
45 free nerd trivia questions with answers. This is the quiz for people who know that a parsec is a distance, that the answer is 42, and that the word 'nerd' was invented by Dr. Seuss. Forty-five questions range across the whole nerd canon: Star Wars and Star Trek, Tolkien's languages and Doctor Who's police box, Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, Zelda, Pokémon, Portal, Tetris and the Konami Code, Marvel and DC's first appearances, and the science and computing lore behind it all, from Grace Hopper's moth and Turing's machine to Voyager's golden record and Schrödinger's cat. No single franchise gets more than a handful of questions, so a Trekkie cannot coast and a Tolkien scholar cannot either. Difficulty runs from medium to genuinely hard, because a nerd quiz that anyone could ace would be missing the point. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the works, people and concepts involved, and each question carries its source. No fan-wiki hearsay.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which computer calculates the Ultimate Answer as 42?
Deep Thought
Deep Thought, built by hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings, spends seven and a half million years computing 42, then admits nobody knows the Question and designs a greater computer, the Earth, to find it.
Q 02Which children's author gave the world its first recorded use of the word 'nerd', in 1950?
Dr. Seuss
Dr. Seuss named a creature a Nerd in If I Ran the Zoo (1950); the slang surfaced in Newsweek in 1951, and dictionaries disagree on whether it came from his book.
Q 03Ernő Rubik, inventor of the Rubik's Cube, was a professor of what?
Architecture
Architecture: Rubik built the first cube from 27 wooden blocks as one of his geometric models, then needed a month to solve it once he had scrambled it.
Q 04The first literal computer 'bug', a moth found in 1947, is linked to which pioneer?
Grace Hopper
Grace Hopper's team taped the moth from the Harvard Mark II into the logbook in 1947; she later wrote the A-0 compiler, helped create COBOL and retired a rear admiral.
Q 05Which operating system was announced in 1991 as 'just a hobby'?
Linux
Linux: Helsinki student Linus Torvalds posted that modest note to a newsgroup in August 1991; his kernel went on to run inside every Android phone.
Q 06Alan Turing did his wartime codebreaking at which British site?
Bletchley Park
Turing joined the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park in September 1939 and led Hut 8, the section that broke German naval Enigma.
Q 07Welshman William Jones first used π for the circle ratio in 1706, but whose adoption of it made the symbol standard?
Leonhard Euler
Leonhard Euler adopted π a few decades after Jones, and because his textbooks were read across Europe the symbol stuck.
Q 08Fibonacci introduced his famous sequence to Western mathematics in a 1202 book using which example?
Breeding rabbits
Breeding rabbits: Liber Abaci asks how many pairs a single pair produces in a year, but the sequence itself is far older, described by Indian scholars of Sanskrit verse centuries before.
Q 09Which rock-and-roll pioneer is on the Voyager Golden Record alongside Bach and Beethoven?
Chuck Berry
Chuck Berry's 'Johnny B. Goode' made the cut after one selector sniffed that rock was adolescent and Carl Sagan answered that there are a lot of adolescents on the planet.
Q 10Despite its name, which NASA probe launched 16 days before its twin in August 1977?
Voyager 2
Voyager 2 lifted off on 20 August 1977 and Voyager 1 on 5 September, but Voyager 1's faster route let it overtake its twin that December and reach Jupiter first.
Q 11Schrödinger's cat was proposed in 1935 as a response to a paper by which three physicists?
Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen
Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen published their paradox in May 1935; Schrödinger's reply that year put a cat in a box with poison triggered by one radioactive decay, to show superposition turning absurd at everyday scale.
Q 12xkcd's tagline describes it as 'a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and' what?
Language
Language completes the tagline. Randall Munroe started xkcd in 2005 by scanning doodles from his old school notebooks, and he says the name is simply a word with no phonetic pronunciation, not an acronym.
Q 13Comic-Con began in 1970 in which California city?
San Diego
Q 21Which company developed the 2007 puzzle game Portal, home of the AI GLaDOS?
Valve
Valve shipped Portal inside The Orange Box in 2007; Ellen McLain voices GLaDOS, who closes the game with Jonathan Coulton's song 'Still Alive'.
Q 22In The Legend of Zelda, what is the name of the land Link and Zelda fight to save?
Hyrule
Hyrule is the kingdom of most Zelda games; the 1986 original sends Link across it to gather the eight fragments of the Triforce of Wisdom and rescue Zelda from Ganon.
Q 23How many Pokémon species were in the original pair of Game Boy games released in 1996?
151
151, from Bulbasaur to Mew: Satoshi Tajiri's Game Freak released Pokémon Red and Green in Japan on 27 February 1996, with Mew hidden in the code as a secret 151st.
San Diego: about 300 fans came to the first three-day Comic-Con at the U.S. Grant Hotel in 1970; by the 2010s it was filling the city's convention centre with more than 130,000.
Q 14Dungeons & Dragons was created by Gary Gygax and which co-designer?
Dave Arneson
Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign supplied the dungeon-crawl ideas that Gygax turned into rules; Tactical Studies Rules published the first boxed set in 1974.
Q 15Which linguist wrote The Klingon Dictionary in 1985 and made Klingon sound deliberately alien?
Marc Okrand
Marc Okrand built Klingon for Star Trek III (1984) from the sounds James Doohan had improvised for the first film, then codified it in The Klingon Dictionary.
Q 16Tolkien's Elvish tongue Quenya took its main inspiration from the sound of what?
Finnish
Finnish: Tolkien said finding a Finnish grammar was like discovering a wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine; his other Elvish tongue, Sindarin, leaned on Welsh.
Q 17From 1925 to 1945 Tolkien held a professorship of what at Oxford?
Anglo-Saxon
Anglo-Saxon: while holding the chair, Tolkien was marking exam papers when he found a blank page and scribbled 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit'.
Q 18Doctor Who debuted the day after which event?
Kennedy's assassination
Kennedy's assassination on 22 November 1963 overshadowed the launch, and the BBC repeated the first episode a week later, just before episode two.
Q 19What does TARDIS stand for?
Time And Relative Dimension In Space
Time And Relative Dimension In Space is how Susan explains the name in the first episode, An Unearthly Child; the plural 'Dimensions' crept in later and both forms have been used on screen.
Q 20Frank Herbert's Dune is set on which desert planet?
Arrakis
Arrakis grew out of a magazine article Herbert never finished, about a US government effort to tame the shifting sand dunes at Florence, Oregon.
Q 24Shigeru Miyamoto first sketched Donkey Kong as a game starring which comic-strip character?
Popeye
Popeye: Miyamoto planned the game around Popeye, Bluto and Olive Oyl, then swapped them for a carpenter, an ape and his girlfriend, reusing unsold Radar Scope cabinets.
Q 25In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, what does Arthur's squire Patsy bang together to mimic hoofbeats?
Coconut shells
Coconut shells: the film could not afford horses, so Patsy clops two halves together, prompting the castle guards' debate over whether a swallow could carry a coconut.
Q 26Superman first appeared in issue #1 of which comic, published in April 1938?
Action Comics
Action Comics #1 paid Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster just $130, at $10 a page, for the Superman story now regarded as the first true superhero comic.
Q 27Which writer, uncredited for decades, was recognised in 2015 as Batman's co-creator?
Bill Finger
Bill Finger wrote Batman's first story and proposed the cowl, cape and the name Bruce Wayne after Bob Kane's early sketch; DC formally credited him in 2015.
Q 28Gene Roddenberry pitched the original Star Trek as what 'to the stars'?
Wagon Train
Wagon Train: westerns ruled 1960s TV, so Roddenberry's 1964 pitch promised the same formula in space, a regular cast on one long journey meeting new guest stars each week.
Q 29Leonard Nimoy based the Vulcan salute on a gesture from what?
A Jewish priestly blessing
A Jewish priestly blessing: Nimoy recalled seeing the kohanim form the Hebrew letter shin with their hands in an Orthodox synagogue as a boy, and reused it in 1967's 'Amok Time'.
Q 30The no-win Kobayashi Maru test was invented for which Star Trek film?
The Wrath of Khan
The Wrath of Khan (1982) opens with Saavik failing the Kobayashi Maru; Kirk later admits he passed only by reprogramming the simulator, earning a commendation for original thinking.