Purple Trivia
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49 free Purple trivia questions with answers. Purple is the colour of emperors, mourning bishops, Prince and a certain dinosaur, and this quiz covers all of it. Forty-five questions run from the sea snails of ancient Tyre and the Byzantine 'born in the purple' to William Perkin's accidental invention of mauve, the Purple Heart, Purple Rain, the Purple People Eaters, amethysts, purple carrots, purple prose and the Purple Forbidden City. It is built for colour-themed trivia nights, classroom warm-ups and anyone who likes a quiz where the questions wander through history, science, music and pop culture. Easy questions ask which two colours mix to make purple; hard ones want the chemical in Tyrian dye and the year the Catholic Church's banned-books list ended. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the colour, its dyes and the things named after it, and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In the RGB colour model, purple is made by mixing which two colours of light?
Red and blue
Red and blue light mixed together give purple on a screen; purple has no single wavelength of its own, which is why it is called a non-spectral colour.
Q 02Which colour sits at the short-wavelength end of the visible spectrum?
Violet
Violet has the shortest wavelengths the eye can see, so a prism or a raindrop bends it the most, which is why it runs along the inner edge of a rainbow.
Q 03Who divided the visible spectrum into seven named colours in 1704?
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton, in his 1704 Opticks, named seven spectral colours; he is said to have chosen seven to match the notes of the musical scale.
Q 04Tyrian purple, the dye of emperors, was extracted from what?
Sea snails
Sea snails of the murex family were heaped in vats and left to rot before the dye could be drawn off, and ancient writers complained about the stench of the works.
Q 05Tyrian purple takes its name from a city in which ancient civilisation?
Phoenicia
Phoenicia: Tyre, now in Lebanon, was the Phoenician city whose dye works gave the colour its name; the word Phoenicia itself may come from the Greek for purple-red.
Q 06Plutarch describes which queen arriving at Tarsus in a gilded barge with purple sails and silver oars?
Cleopatra
Cleopatra staged the entrance in 41 BC to dazzle Mark Antony, reclining under a gold canopy dressed as Venus; the crowd ran to the river and left him sitting alone in the marketplace.
Q 07What did Tyrian purple do in sunlight and weather that set it apart from other ancient dyes?
It kept its colour
It kept its colour: where most ancient dyes faded, Tyrian purple held fast for generations, a big part of why buyers paid so much for it.
Q 08In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which turtle wears a purple mask and fights with a wooden staff?
Donatello
Donatello is the team's inventor; the colour-coded masks only arrived with the 1987 cartoon, which also gave the turtles their catchphrases and their love of pizza.
Q 09Which Roman author's Natural History describes how Tyrian purple was made?
Pliny the Elder
Pliny the Elder's Natural History has the dye steeped for three days and then slowly boiled down; he judged the finest Tyrian shade to be the colour of clotted blood.
Q 10The Byzantine title porphyrogennetos, 'purple-born', went to a ruler's child who was born when?
After the father took the throne
After the father took the throne: the title was reserved for children born to a reigning emperor, delivered in the Porphyra, a chamber of the Great Palace lined with purple porphyry stone.
Q 11Roman senators and senior magistrates were entitled to wear what purple detail on their togas?
A stripe
A stripe: magistrates wore the toga praetexta with a purple border, and senators a broad purple stripe, the latus clavus; under the empire, full purple without permission could be punished as treason.
Q 12Which ruler, crowned emperor in Rome in 800, is linked to a purple Byzantine silk burial shroud that still survives?
Charlemagne
Charlemagne died at Aachen in 814; in 1165 Frederick Barbarossa had him declared a saint, but by an antipope, so Rome never recognised it.
Q 13In 1464 Pope Paul II decreed cardinals should swap Tyrian purple for which colour?
Scarlet
Q 21Purple, green and white were the colours of which early-20th-century movement?
Women's suffrage
Women's suffrage: the WSPU chose purple for dignity, white for purity and green for hope, and suffragettes wore the tricolour on sashes and badges.
Q 22In Nazi concentration camps, prisoners made to wear a purple triangle belonged to which group?
Jehovah's Witnesses
Jehovah's Witnesses, called Bibelforscher by the Nazis, wore the purple triangle for refusing military service and the Hitler salute; other groups were marked with red, black, pink and other colours.
Q 23Prince's album Purple Rain is the soundtrack to a 1984 film set in which city, his home town?
Minneapolis
The dye's supply had collapsed after Constantinople fell, and scarlet from kermes insects took its place.
Q 14Which culture developed the first synthetic purple pigment?
China
China: Han purple, a barium copper silicate, coloured the Terracotta Army; one theory is that Taoist alchemists hit on it while making glass meant to look like jade.
Q 15What was 18-year-old William Perkin trying to make in 1856 when he accidentally created the dye mauveine?
Quinine
Quinine, the malaria drug, was his target; his professor August Hofmann had set the challenge, and instead the 18-year-old Perkin founded the synthetic dye industry with his aniline purple.
Q 16The name mauve comes from the French word for which flower?
Mallow
Mallow: the French mauve names the mallow flower, whose petals match the dye's shade; Perkin's dye was sold as aniline purple before the name mauve caught on in 1859.
Q 17Which monarch fuelled 'mauve mania' by wearing the colour to her eldest daughter's wedding in 1858?
Queen Victoria
Queen Victoria wore mauve velvet to the Princess Royal's wedding, and the craze spread so fast that Punch joked the 'mauve measles' were getting out of hand.
Q 18Who established the Badge of Military Merit, forerunner of the Purple Heart, in 1782?
George Washington
George Washington created the Badge of Military Merit on 7 August 1782 at his Newburgh, New York, headquarters; only three awards are documented, and it lapsed after the Revolution.
Q 19Which general, then Army chief of staff, revived the Purple Heart in 1932?
Douglas MacArthur
Douglas MacArthur quietly reopened work on the design and issued it on the 200th birthday of the man who created its forerunner; the first Purple Heart went to MacArthur himself.
Q 20For what is the Purple Heart awarded?
Being wounded or killed in service
Being wounded or killed in service earns it; so many were struck for an invasion of Japan that never came that the stockpile was still being handed out half a century later.
Minneapolis: the film centres on the city's First Avenue club, where the title song's basic track had been recorded live at a benefit concert in August 1983.
Q 24Which Purple Rain track's lyrics helped prompt Tipper Gore to campaign for Parental Advisory stickers?
Darling Nikki
Darling Nikki's explicit opening lyric shocked Tipper Gore when she heard her 11-year-old daughter playing it; the PMRC's 'Filthy Fifteen' list put the song at number one.
Q 25Which Prince single from Purple Rain was his first Billboard Hot 100 number one?
When Doves Cry
When Doves Cry topped the Hot 100 for five weeks in summer 1984, Prince's first number one; famously the track has no bass line.
Q 26Jimi Hendrix said the title of Purple Haze came from what?
A dream of walking under the sea
A dream of walking under the sea gave Hendrix the title, he said; he had also been reading a science-fiction novel in which sunspots cast a 'purplish haze' over a distant planet.
Q 27What was sprayed on anti-apartheid protesters in Cape Town on 2 September 1989?
Purple dye from a water cannon
Purple dye from a police water cannon drenched the marchers; a protester turned the cannon on National Party headquarters, and graffiti soon declared 'The purple shall govern'.
Q 28Amethyst is a purple-hued variety of which mineral?
Quartz
Quartz: amethyst is silicon dioxide whose iron impurities, irradiated naturally in the rock, produce the violet colour.
Q 29The name amethyst comes from Greek words meaning what?
Not intoxicated
Not intoxicated: Greek amethystos joins a- ('not') to methyo ('I am drunk'); the ancients believed the stone warded off drunkenness and drank from amethyst cups.
Q 30Amethyst is the birthstone for which month?
February
February's birthstone is amethyst; it ranked among the cardinal gems with diamond, ruby, sapphire and emerald until huge deposits found in Brazil crashed its price.