Punctuation
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50 free Punctuation trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Punctuation is the part of writing most people learned once and have argued about ever since. A single comma can change who inherits, who gets paid overtime and whether Grandma is invited to dinner or served for it, which is why editors, lawyers and teachers all care where the small marks go. This quiz mixes the rules with the stories. Expect questions on commas in dates and addresses, apostrophes in plurals and possessives, where periods sit beside quotation marks, and how to punctuate the titles of books, films and poems, alongside the odd origins of marks you see every day and a few you have probably never typed. The questions suit students revising for an English test, writers who want a quick check on their habits, and anyone who enjoys language trivia. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches the rule.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The punctuation bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves takes its title from a joke about which animal?
Panda
Panda meals are shoots and leaves, but add one comma and the bear dines, fires a gun and walks out. Lynne Truss borrowed the joke for her 2003 guide to careful punctuation.
Q 02Which language opens questions with an upside-down question mark, as its royal academy advised in 1754?
Spanish
Spanish brackets a question at both ends, so readers know the tone from the first word. The same academy ordered a matching upside-down exclamation mark.
Q 03Which 1962 invention by adman Martin Speckter fuses a question mark and an exclamation point?
Interrobang
Interrobang joins interrogation to bang, printers' slang for the exclamation mark. Speckter wanted one tidy sign for the incredulous questions that fill advertisements.
Q 04Which symbol, once recited as the 27th letter of the English alphabet, began as a joined-up Latin et?
Ampersand
Ampersand is a slurred form of the chant and per se and, which pupils recited when the symbol closed the alphabet. Its curves still hide the letters E and T.
Q 05What is the popular name for the optional mark before 'and' in a list such as red, white, and blue?
Oxford comma
Oxford comma honours Oxford University Press, whose printer Horace Hart is most often credited with the habit. Editors call the same mark the serial comma.
Q 06In American telegrams, which word was spelled out to mark the end of a sentence in place of a period?
Stop
Stop was spelled out because a tiny dot was easily lost or misplaced in transmission. The US government spread the habit in wartime to keep messages from being garbled.
Q 07Which Amherst poet strewed her verse with dashes and odd capitals that her first editors removed?
Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson complained that an editor's added comma and a period swapped for her dash altered the meaning of an entire poem. Her first collections were tidied the same way.
Q 08Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!, the only town named with two exclamation marks, is in which Canadian province?
Quebec
Quebec owes the name to haha, an archaic French word for an unexpected obstacle, here a sharp bend in a nearby lake. Guinness gave the town a world record for it in 2017.
Q 09The comma, named for a small white punctuation-shaped spot under its hindwing, is which kind of insect?
Butterfly
Butterfly watchers know the comma by ragged wings that look like a dead leaf when folded. A North American cousin with a curved line and a dot is called the question mark.
Q 10In mathematics, an exclamation mark written after a whole number tells you to carry out which operation?
Factorial
Factorial means multiplying a number by every whole number below it, so 4! is 4 × 3 × 2 × 1 = 24. Mathematicians read that aloud as four factorial.
Q 11In standard American style, where do commas and periods sit relative to a closing quotation mark?
Inside it
Inside it is the American rule, kept because the closer spacing was judged to look cleaner. British style lets logic decide, so a comma that was not in the original stays out.
Q 12Which of these titles do most style guides italicise, as a complete work, instead of using quotation marks?
A feature film
A feature film is a complete work, so its title is italicised like that of a book, play or periodical. Pieces that sit within a bigger work get quotation marks.
Q 13Which of these titles takes quotation marks rather than italics because it is part of a larger work?
A song
Q 21Which symbol usually marks the second footnote on a page and can also flag a date of death?
Dagger
Dagger marks descend from the obelus, a line that scholars once drew beside passages in manuscripts to flag them. A third footnote takes the double dagger.
Q 22Bell Labs workers adding two keys to the telephone keypad coined which odd name for the hash sign?
Octothorpe
Octothorpe was coined by 1968 because the eleventh and twelfth keys on the new keypad needed named symbols. The word first turned up in a US patent in a 1973 filing.
Q 23What is the name of the backwards-P symbol that medieval scribes drew in red to open a new paragraph?
Pilcrow
Pilcrow shapes grew from a letter C, for the Latin capitulum, that rubricators dressed up with vertical bars and a filled-in bowl. Editors also call it the blind P.
A song gets quotation marks while the album that holds it gets italics. The same split separates an episode from its television series.
Q 14In handwriting or on a typewriter, what traditionally stands in for italics in the title of a book?
Underlining
Underlining in a manuscript told the typesetter to set those words in italic, which is why one usage manual calls italics its print equivalent.
Q 15Which journalists' style guide breaks with Chicago and MLA by putting book titles in quotation marks?
AP Stylebook
AP Stylebook rules put quotation marks around books, poems, speeches and works of art alike, and tell reporters never to italicise any of them.
Q 16The life-saving comma in 'Let's eat, Grandma' is required because Grandma is the person being what?
Spoken to
Spoken to is the test: a name used in speaking to someone is set off by commas, a rule grammarians call the vocative. Drop the mark and Grandma becomes the meal.
Q 17Mid-sentence, how do most style manuals punctuate the state in a pair such as Dallas, Texas?
A comma on each side
A comma on each side is the rule because the state is treated as an aside, as in The plane landed in Kampala, Uganda, that evening. A country after a city works the same way.
Q 18What do the US Postal Service and Royal Mail advise doing with commas in an address on an envelope?
Leaving them out
Leaving them out helps the machines: punctuation hinders the optical character recognition that reads addresses on letters and parcels.
Q 19Which three-dot punctuation mark, also known as suspension points, shows that words have been left out?
Ellipsis
Ellipsis points can also mark a pause in speech or a thought left hanging. Some style guides add a period before the three dots when the cut falls between two sentences.
Q 20Which symbol, named from an ancient word meaning little star, most often calls out a lone footnote?
Asterisk
Asterisk marks were used by the ancient scholar Aristarchus of Samothrace to flag lines that were duplicated elsewhere in a text.
Q 24What are the sideways double chevrons « », used as quotation marks in French, properly called?
Guillemets
Guillemets are apparently named after the printer Guillaume Le Bé, though he did not invent them: they first appear in a 1527 book printed by Josse Bade.
Q 25Which mark separates hours from minutes in a digital time and a book's title from its subtitle?
Colon
Colon duties also stretch to Bible citations, where the mark divides chapter from verse, and to the two numbers of a ratio.
Q 26Which paired marks did Erasmus nickname lunula, after the shape of the crescent moon?
Parentheses
Parentheses reminded Erasmus of little moons, so he coined a Latin nickname for them. Americans keep the longer word, while Britons often just say brackets.
Q 27Which mark, also known as a virgule or solidus, shows the line breaks when poetry is quoted in prose?
Slash
Slash marks keep the shape of a poem alive within a paragraph, since dropping the line breaks risks losing meaning. Britons often call the same mark a stroke.
Q 28Which mark, traditionally half the width of its longer cousin, joins the ends of a range like 1914–1918?
En dash
En dash use extends to linking two competitors or alternatives, and in a range it stands for the word to or through. Printers also know it as the en rule or nut dash.
Q 29Which V-shaped proofreader's mark, its name Latin for 'it lacks', shows where missing text belongs?
Caret
Caret marks sit below the line when the missing piece is low punctuation such as a comma, and are flipped above the line for a high mark such as an apostrophe.
Q 30Which symbol, common in citations of legal codes, looks like one letter S stacked on top of another?
Section sign
Section sign shapes most probably began as two S glyphs joined together, from the Latin signum sectionis. Many other languages read the same symbol aloud as paragraph.