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60 free Nineteen Eighty-Four trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Nineteen Eighty-Four trivia quiz covers George Orwell's 1984 from the first diary entry to the Chestnut Tree Café. The story questions take in Airstrip One and Oceania, the Ministry of Truth and its three slogans, telescreens and memory holes, the Two Minutes Hate, the antiques shop, the Junior Anti-Sex League, the forbidden book, the switch from Eurasia to Eastasia, and the rats behind the door of Room 101. Then it turns to how the book came to be: the Tehran Conference that gave Orwell the idea, the Russian novel that showed him the form, the working title he dropped, the tuberculosis he wrote through, the manuscript his widow sold for £50, and the Soviet slogan behind '2 + 2 = 5'. The last stretch follows the book into the world, from Peter Cushing and John Hurt to David Bowie, Radiohead, Apple's Super Bowl commercial and the sales spike of 2017. For Orwell's life beyond this one novel, BrainPickle has a separate George Orwell quiz. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on the novel, Newspeak, Big Brother and the ministries, and each explanation adds one detail worth remembering.
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Q 01In which year was Nineteen Eighty-Four published?
1949
It was Orwell's ninth and last completed book; he died seven months after it appeared.
Q 02What is the name of the novel's protagonist?
Winston Smith
He is 39, a phlegmatic everyman in the Outer Party who has vague memories of the time before the Revolution.
Q 03What has Great Britain been renamed in the novel?
Airstrip One
It is a province of one of three totalitarian superstates locked in perpetual war.
Q 04Which superstate does the protagonist live in?
Oceania
The other two superstates alternate as its enemy; when the enemy switches mid-week the past is rewritten to say it was always so.
Q 05What is the name of the Party's ruling ideology?
Ingsoc
It is a contraction of 'English Socialism', which Orwell saw as a perversion of the socialist ideals he actually held.
Q 06Where does the protagonist work, rewriting old newspaper records?
The Ministry of Truth
It is a 300-metre white concrete pyramid with over 3,000 rooms, modelled on London's Senate House where the wartime Ministry of Information sat.
Q 07Which government department, despite its name, actually runs the state's armed forces?
The Ministry of Peace
Its abbreviated name is Minipax; each ministry's name is the opposite of what it does, a deliberate exercise in doublethink.
Q 08What word completes the third Party slogan: 'WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS ...'?
Strength
The three slogans are cut into the outside wall of the white pyramid where the protagonist works.
Q 09What are the two-way devices that watch Party members in their homes called?
Telescreens
Middle-class members can turn them down but never off; only the Inner Party can switch theirs off entirely.
Q 10What are the ducts called into which inconvenient documents are dropped for burning?
Memory holes
They lead to a huge furnace, and Orwell based the practice on Soviet airbrushing of purged officials out of photographs.
Q 11What is the term for someone the Party has erased from all records after falling from favour?
An unperson
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia once told subscribers to cut out the article on Beria and paste in extra pages on the Bering Sea instead.
Q 12Which shopkeeper sells the protagonist his diary and later rents him a room?
Mr Charrington
The kindly antiques dealer turns out to be an undercover Thought Police officer, and a telescreen is hidden behind a picture in the room.
Q 13What is the name of the young woman with whom the protagonist begins a secret affair?
Julia
She maintains the novel-writing machines at the ministry and publicly wears the sash of a fanatical Party youth organisation.
Q 21During Hate Week, the state's enemy abruptly switches from Eurasia to which power?
Eastasia
Orwell was thinking of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, after which criticism of Germany vanished from the Soviet press overnight.
Q 22What is the Party's artificial, shrinking language called?
Newspeak
Its aim is to make unorthodox thought literally unthinkable; the novel's appendix suggests it never fully caught on.
Q 23Which colleague of the protagonist is compiling a new edition of the Party's dictionary?
Syme
The protagonist predicts, correctly, that Syme is 'too intelligent' and will be vaporised.
Q 14Which fanatical organisation does the protagonist's lover publicly belong to?
The Junior Anti-Sex League
She enjoys small private rebellions but has no interest in overthrowing the regime.
Q 15What is the name of the protagonist's estranged wife?
Katharine
They separated because they could not conceive; divorce is banned, and he regrets not pushing her over a quarry edge when he had the chance.
Q 16Which Inner Party official pretends to recruit the protagonist into the resistance?
O'Brien
He is really Thought Police, and later tells his prisoner that the Party seeks power purely for its own sake.
Q 17What is the name of the supposed underground resistance movement?
The Brotherhood
The protagonist is told he will never know whether it really exists.
Q 18Who is the reviled enemy of the state whose face is screened during the daily hate ritual?
Emmanuel Goldstein
With his small goatee beard he evokes Trotsky, and the film of him turning into a bleating sheep echoes a Soviet propaganda reel that turned Trotsky into a goat.
Q 19What is the title of the forbidden book supposedly written by the enemy of the state?
The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism
The protagonist is later told it was written collaboratively by the Party itself.
Q 20What is the daily ritual in which Party members scream at a film of the state's enemy?
The Two Minutes Hate
Orwell modelled it on the short pep-talk rallies workers were given before shifts in the Stalinist period; the week-long version is Hate Week.
Q 24Why is the poet Ampleforth arrested?
He left the word 'God' in a Kipling poem
He could not find another rhyme for 'rod'; the protagonist meets him again in the cells.
Q 25Who denounces the loyal Party man Tom Parsons for talking against the Party in his sleep?
His young daughter
Both Parsons children belong to the Spies, a youth group that trains children to inform; even in prison Parsons says he could do 'good work' in a labour camp.
Q 26What is the name of the youth organisation the Parsons children belong to?
The Spies
They fire catapults at grown-ups and dream of the day they can report their parents.
Q 27What is the protagonist's worst fear, used against him in the torture chamber?
Rats
A wire cage shaped to fit over the face is fitted to him, and he breaks by begging that it be done to his lover instead.
Q 28What is the number of the room that contains each prisoner's worst nightmare?
101
Orwell named it after a conference room at BBC Broadcasting House where he sat through tedious meetings.
Q 29Which real building was the architectural model for the protagonist's ministry building?
Senate House, University of London
It housed the real Ministry of Information during the war; Orwell's wife Eileen worked there in the censorship department.
Q 30The Party's equation '2 + 2 = 5' was originally a slogan of which regime?
The Soviet Union
It urged workers to finish the second five-year plan in four years, and was displayed in electric lights on Moscow house-fronts.