Oxford University Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Oxford University trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Oxford has been teaching for more than nine centuries, and in that time it has collected more rituals, rivalries and eccentrics than any other university on earth. Students still sit exams in gowns, a bell still tolls for the founding scholars every night, and one of its colleges marks the end of summer time by walking backwards. This quiz covers the colleges and the stories behind their founding, the libraries and museums, the Boat Race against Cambridge, the writers who drank together on Tuesdays, the Rhodes Scholars who went on to run countries, and the films and novels that used the city as a set. It suits anyone who has walked the High Street, watched a detective drama set among the spires, or simply wants to know why the other place calls its quads something different.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which tavern grievance sparked Oxford's 1355 St Scholastica Day riot that killed dozens of scholars?
The quality of the wine
The quality of the wine served to two students at the Swindlestock Tavern started it all; the town's mayor was made to do annual penance for the dead until 1825, when one incumbent finally refused.
Q 02Great Tom tolls 101 times at 9:05 each night, once per original scholar, over which college?
Christ Church
Christ Church began with 100 scholars and later added one, hence 101 strokes; 9:05 pm is nine o'clock in old 'Oxford time', which ran five minutes behind Greenwich.
Q 03By Oxford tradition, what colour carnation does a student pin on for the final exam of their run?
Red
Red marks the last paper: candidates start in white and switch to pink for the exams between; after the final one, friends 'trash' the finalist, still in exam dress, with flour, confetti and alcohol.
Q 04Which Latin-derived term names the dark clothes, gown and cap Oxford students wear to sit exams?
Sub fusc
Sub fusc comes from the Latin for 'of a dark or dusky colour'; when Oxford students voted in 2015 on whether it should stay compulsory for exams, about three in four chose to keep it.
Q 05Which future Australian prime minister set an Oxford college record for downing a yard of ale?
Bob Hawke
Bob Hawke set the record among students of University College; in 1980 he gave up alcohol in order to run for Parliament.
Q 06The Inklings met informally in the 'Rabbit Room' of which Oxford pub?
The Eagle and Child
The Eagle and Child gave the group a private back room for informal talk; the Thursday-evening sessions where they read out their unfinished manuscripts took place in Lewis's college rooms instead.
Q 07Which college's students walk backwards round its Fellows' Quad drinking port as the clocks go back?
Merton
Merton's 'Time Ceremony' was invented by two undergraduates in 1971 as a spoof of older Oxford rituals; its stated purpose is to protect the space-time continuum while the clocks change.
Q 08Hammersmith Bridge's closure and COVID rules sent the 2021 Boat Race from the Thames to which river?
The Great Ouse
The Great Ouse near Ely hosted both races behind closed doors, on Cambridge's own training water, with female umpires for the first time; the 2020 race had been cancelled outright.
Q 09Philip Pullman based Lyra's Jordan College in His Dark Materials on which Oxford college, his own?
Exeter
Exeter also produced Tolkien, Richard Burton and Roger Bannister; The Golden Compass filmed there in 2007, and Inspector Morse suffered his fatal heart attack in its Front Quad in the final episode.
Q 10The Bodleian's vaulted Divinity School doubled as which Hogwarts location in the Harry Potter films?
The hospital wing
The hospital wing scenes were shot there, along with Professor McGonagall's dance lesson; the Bodleian has also appeared in The Golden Compass, Wonka and The Madness of King George.
Q 11Which first name did Colin Dexter finally reveal for Inspector Morse in Death Is Now My Neighbour?
Endeavour
Endeavour became the title of the 2012–2023 prequel series starring Shaun Evans; on television Morse hinted at it with the clue 'my whole life's effort has revolved around Eve, nine letters'.
Q 12Oxford policeman Albert Alexander became the first patient treated with which drug in 1941?
Penicillin
Penicillin rallied Alexander for days until Howard Florey's team ran out of it and he died; the famous 'rose-thorn scratch' that started his infection was more likely a bombing-raid injury.
Q 13Which drug company manufactured the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Oxford's Jenner Institute in 2020?
AstraZeneca
Q 21Which circular domed library of 1749, designed by James Gibbs, is now a Bodleian reading room?
Radcliffe Camera
Radcliffe Camera takes 'camera' from the Latin for room; the physician John Radcliffe left £40,000 in 1714 to build it, and an underground reading room, the Gladstone Link, now joins it to the Old Bodleian.
Q 22Which 1660s Wren building gave Oxford's rowdy degree ceremonies a home outside St Mary's church?
The Sheldonian Theatre
The Sheldonian Theatre was paid for almost entirely by Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury, at a cost of £14,470 when a craftsman earned £2 to £4 a year; it still hosts graduations and Encaenia.
Q 23Whose house style, set down by printer Horace Hart, gave the serial comma its nickname?
AstraZeneca signed an initially not-for-profit licence with the university in 2020 and agreed 300 million US doses at about $4 each; Sarah Gilbert co-led the Oxford team, and the jab was withdrawn worldwide by May 2024.
Q 14Whose annual Tortoise Fair races its mascot against rival colleges' tortoises for charity?
Corpus Christi
Corpus Christi's elected Tortoise Keeper looks after its mascot, named Foxe after the college's founder; on race day the tortoises start inside a ring of lettuce and the first to reach the leaves wins.
Q 15Whose choir sings the Hymnus Eucharisticus from the top of its tower at 6 am on May Morning?
Magdalen
Magdalen's tradition dates to the days of Henry VII; after the hymn the Dean of Divinity leads prayers for the city and the choir sings the madrigal 'Now Is the Month of Maying' to the crowd below.
Q 16Opened in 1683 around a donated cabinet of curiosities, what is Britain's first public museum?
The Ashmolean
The Ashmolean was built for the curiosities Elias Ashmole gave the university, many of them first gathered by the gardener John Tradescant and his son; it opened in 1683 with the naturalist Robert Plot as keeper.
Q 17Which Oxford collection took its shrunken heads off display in 2020 after decades on show?
Pitt Rivers Museum
Pitt Rivers Museum's director said exhibiting the tsantsas 'reinforced racist and stereotypical thinking'; its largest object is an 11-metre Haida house post from British Columbia.
Q 18Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce argued over Darwin in 1860 inside which brand-new Oxford building?
Museum of Natural History
The Museum of Natural History had opened that very year; the clash came at a British Association meeting, and because nobody took it down verbatim, what the two men actually said is still uncertain.
Q 19Which extinct bird did the stammering Lewis Carroll cast as himself in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland?
The dodo
The dodo's only surviving soft tissue anywhere is a dried head in Oxford's university museum, where Carroll and Alice Liddell used to go to look at the remains.
Q 20Which Oxford institution keeps the blackboard Einstein chalked during his 1931 lecture there?
History of Science Museum
The History of Science Museum has the board because dons including E. J. Bowen rescued it after Einstein's lecture of 16 May 1931; it sits among some 18,000 objects on Broad Street.
Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press had Hart write the rules for its own compositors, yet the label 'Oxford comma' only surfaced in 1978, in Peter Sutcliffe's history of the publisher.
Q 24Who edited the first Oxford English Dictionary from an iron shed he called the Scriptorium?
James Murray
James Murray's team hoped to finish in ten years; he died in 1915 with the dictionary still incomplete, and the last part only appeared in 1928, some seventy years after the project began.
Q 25Which Civil War army surgeon fed the Oxford English Dictionary quotations from a secure asylum?
William Chester Minor
William Chester Minor shot a man in London in 1872 during a delusion and spent 38 years locked up, mining his own antiquarian library; Simon Winchester told the story in The Surgeon of Crowthorne.
Q 26The Oxford Union's notorious 1933 debate voted 275 to 153 never to fight for what?
King and Country
King and Country became known as the 'Oxford Oath'; three weeks later Randolph Churchill tried to have the motion expunged from the records and lost 750 votes to 138 amid hisses.
Q 27What does Cambridge call the enclosed college squares that Oxford knows as quads?
Courts
Courts is the Cambridge word, as in Trinity's Great Court, where students try to run the perimeter before the clock finishes striking twelve, a dash re-created in the film Chariots of Fire.
Q 28Which novelist coined 'Oxbridge' in 1850 by sending Pendennis to the fictional Boniface College?
Thackeray
Thackeray also coined 'Camford' in the same novel, but it never caught on; Virginia Woolf, citing him, took up 'Oxbridge' in A Room of One's Own in 1929.
Q 29Which crime novelist was among the first women awarded an Oxford degree in 1920?
Dorothy L. Sayers
Dorothy L. Sayers had earned first-class honours at Somerville in 1915, but Oxford did not then confer degrees on women, so she waited five years; from 1927 to 1957 a quota still capped women's numbers.
Q 30Which Oxford term, running January to March, is named for a fourth-century bishop of Poitiers?
Hilary
Hilary term takes its name from St Hilary, whose feast falls in mid-January; the labels come from the medieval legal calendar, and England's judges still sit in a Hilary term each winter.