Seattle Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
8correct to beat the crowd
125 free Seattle trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Seattle trivia quiz has 125 questions on the Emerald City, from the Denny Party landing at Alki Point in 1851 to the Sphere-era boom of the 2020s. The easy questions are for anyone who has visited or watched Frasier: the tower built for the 1962 World's Fair, the market where they throw the fish, the coffee chain that started there, the mountain on the horizon and the nickname of the football crowd. The harder ones are for locals and history buffs: the glue pot that started the Great Fire, the ton of gold on the S.S. Portland, why the streets in Pioneer Square were raised, the billboard about turning out the lights, and which street is the only one to run unbroken from Elliott Bay to Lake Washington. The quiz covers the city's history, geography and weather, its landmarks and neighbourhoods, its music from Jackson Street jazz to Sub Pop and grunge, its companies from Boeing and UPS to Microsoft, Amazon, Costco and REI, its film and TV connections, and its sports teams. If you want to go deeper on the teams, we also have separate Seattle Seahawks, Seattle Mariners and Seattle Kraken quizzes, plus one on Sleepless in Seattle. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the city, its landmarks, its companies and its teams before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Try our Portland, San Francisco and Washington State quizzes next.
30 of 125 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Seattle is named after a chief of which two Native American peoples?
The Duwamish and Suquamish
Chief Seattle led the Duwamish and Suquamish peoples, signed the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott and opposed the attacks on settlers that followed; he died on the Suquamish reservation in 1866.
Q 02Where did the Denny Party land on November 13, 1851?
Alki Point
Alki Point did not hold the Denny Party long: by the following April most of them had moved across the bay to a better-protected harbour, the start of today's downtown.
Q 03What did a party of Seattle businessmen take from a village in Alaska in 1899 and raise in Pioneer Square?
A totem pole
A totem pole taken from a Tlingit village by a Chamber of Commerce party of prominent citizens was unveiled to cheering crowds in October 1899; a successor pole stands on the spot today.
Q 04Which pioneer persuaded his fellow settlers to name their village after his friend Chief Seattle?
Doc Maynard
Doc Maynard, who had just moved his general store to the village, championed his friend's name among the settlers, and the town plats filed in May 1853 made it official.
Q 05The Chinook word "alki" in New York Alki means roughly what?
By and by, or someday
Alki is Chinook Jargon for by and by or someday, so New York Alki meant New York eventually, Charles Terry's hopeful name for the landing-site settlement.
Q 06Which European explorer was the first to visit the Seattle area, in May 1792?
George Vancouver
George Vancouver sailed HMS Discovery into these waters in May 1792 and named Mount Rainier after a friend, Rear Admiral Peter Rainier.
Q 07Puget Sound is named after whom?
A Royal Navy lieutenant
A Royal Navy lieutenant, Peter Puget, explored the sound's southern reaches by boat in 1792, and his captain named those waters for him; the name later spread to the whole inlet.
Q 08Which nickname replaced "Queen City" as Seattle's epithet in the early 1980s?
The Emerald City
The Emerald City won a contest held in 1981 to find a slogan for selling Seattle to tourists; it was no one person's brainwave, since several entrants sent in the same name.
Q 09Which Seattle street is the supposed origin of the term "Skid Row"?
Yesler Way
Yesler Way began as the skid road down which logs slid to Henry Yesler's waterfront sawmill; the rough district that grew up beside it is said to have given skid row its meaning.
Q 10What accidentally started the Great Seattle Fire of 1889?
An overheated glue pot in a carpentry shop
An overheated glue pot in a carpentry shop boiled over on June 6, 1889; a worker threw water on the burning glue, which only spread it, and by nightfall the business district was gone.
Q 11Why does the Seattle Underground exist beneath Pioneer Square?
Streets were raised after the 1889 fire
Streets were raised after the 1889 fire to cure sewers that backed up at high tide; the old ground floors were left below, and for a time pedestrians climbed ladders between the two levels.
Q 12Which ship docked in Seattle in July 1897 with its famed "ton of gold"?
S.S. Portland
S.S. Portland tied up in July 1897 with more than a ton of Klondike gold aboard, and Seattle quickly made itself the outfitting and supply point for the rush that followed.
Q 13Which 1909 fair largely shaped the layout of the University of Washington campus?
Q 21Where is Boeing's wide-body aircraft plant in the Seattle area?
Everett
Everett's plant was built in the late 1960s to assemble the new 747, and the result is the largest building in the world by volume.
Q 22The first Starbucks opened in 1971 just outside which Seattle location, moving inside in 1976?
Pike Place Market
Pike Place Market had the first Starbucks on its doorstep at 2000 Western Avenue; the shop sold only roasted coffee beans, not drinks, and moved into the market itself in 1976.
Q 23From which city did Microsoft move to the Seattle suburbs in 1979?
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Albuquerque, New Mexico, was home to MITS, maker of the Altair 8800 and the first customer for the founders' software; in 1979 the two Lakeside School friends brought the firm home to the Seattle area.
The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition
The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition was laid out on the University of Washington's largely forested grounds, and its Rainier Vista axis, aimed at the mountain, became the spine of the campus.
Q 14Which delivery giant was founded in Seattle in 1907 with a $100 loan?
UPS
UPS began in 1907 as a messenger service that two teenagers ran from a Seattle basement, delivering on foot and by bicycle; it took the United Parcel Service name in 1919.
Q 15What early labour milestone did Seattle see in 1919?
A general strike
A general strike stopped Seattle for five days in February 1919, when some 65,000 workers walked out in support of striking shipyard unions; the feared revolution never came and the city stayed calm.
Q 16In 1926 Seattle's Bertha Knight Landes became the first woman to hold which office in a major American city?
Mayor
Mayor Bertha Knight Landes won office in 1926 by beating the incumbent on a promise to clean up city government; she lost her bid for a second term two years later.
Q 17Which 1962 world's fair gave Seattle the Space Needle and the Monorail?
Century 21 Exposition
The Century 21 Exposition drew close to 10 million visitors in six months of 1962 and left its grounds to the city as Seattle Center, its science pavilion reborn as Pacific Science Center.
Q 18What did a famous early-1970s billboard ask the last person leaving Seattle to do?
Turn out the lights
Turn out the lights, asked the billboard two estate agents put up as a joke in April 1971, during the Boeing Bust, when the company had shed more than half its workforce.
Q 19To which city did Boeing move its corporate headquarters from Seattle in 2001?
Chicago
Chicago was picked in May 2001 because, Boeing said, it was central to its customers yet separate from its existing operations; the head office moved again in 2022, to Arlington, Virginia.
Q 20What business had made William Boeing wealthy before he turned to building aircraft in Seattle?
Timber
Timber made William Boeing rich: he left Yale to buy forest land around Grays Harbor, and only later, unimpressed by a seaplane he had bought, decided he could build a better one.
Q 24In which Seattle suburb did Jeff Bezos found Amazon in 1994?
Bellevue
Bellevue was where Jeff Bezos started Amazon in 1994, in the garage of a rented house; within months it moved to an industrial corner of Seattle, and the bookshop opened online in July 1995.
Q 25Amazon's move to which neighbourhood set off a historic construction boom?
South Lake Union
South Lake Union became Amazon's campus when the company left its old headquarters on Beacon Hill, and its hiring drew a wave of office and apartment towers to a district of old workshops and warehouses.
Q 26Where is Costco's worldwide headquarters?
Issaquah
Costco moved its headquarters to Issaquah in 1996; its Kirkland Signature label keeps the name of its previous home, another Eastside suburb.
Q 27What did Nordstrom sell exclusively when it opened in 1901?
Shoes
Shoes were all Wallin & Nordstrom sold from 1901 until 1963; John Nordstrom had paid for the shop with the proceeds of a gold claim he staked in the Klondike.
Q 28How was the Seattle outdoor retailer REI set up in 1938?
As a consumers' co-operative
As a consumers' co-operative: climber Lloyd Anderson had ordered an ice axe direct from Austria, and the co-op he and his wife Mary then founded helped fellow climbers get good gear at fair prices.
Q 29Which airline is headquartered in the city of SeaTac?
Alaska Airlines
Alaska Airlines, despite its name, is run from SeaTac in Washington state; it grew out of a 1932 charter service that flew a single three-seat plane out of Anchorage.
Q 30The city of SeaTac took its name from what?
The airport's nickname
The airport's nickname, Sea-Tac, became the new city's name in 1990; it had survived a 1983 vote to rename the airport after Senator Henry Jackson, reversed when Tacoma objected.