Slang
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
98 free Slang trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
42 free slang trivia questions with answers. This slang trivia quiz digs into where the words we actually use came from: the Boston newspaper joke that produced OK, the dandies who were the first dudes, the jazz musician who made cool cool, the New Orleans rap that gave the dictionary bling, the flapper who was the bee's knees, the surfers and Valley girls, Cockney rhyming slang and Polari, Australia's 5,000 diminutives, the acronyms of the internet age (LOL, OMG, YOLO, FOMO), and the Gen Z and Gen Alpha words that dictionaries have been crowning word of the year: selfie, rizz, brain rot, skibidi. Some questions are easy for anyone who has been online this decade; others go back a century or more and will test people who read dictionary etymologies for fun. It suits a pub quiz language round, an ESL classroom or a family argument about whether anyone should still say groovy. Every answer has been checked against a dictionary or reference source, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01"OK" first appeared in print in 1839 as a jokey abbreviation of what?
Oll korrect
The Boston Morning Post printed OK on 23 March 1839 as a jokey abbreviation of 'oll korrect', riding a fad for comic misspellings of common phrases.
Q 02Which US president's 1840 campaign nickname helped make "OK" a national word?
Martin Van Buren
Martin Van Buren's 1840 re-election campaign played on 'Old Kinderhook', after his New York birthplace, and its 'OK Clubs' helped spread the abbreviation; he lost the election, but the word stuck.
Q 03When "dude" became New York's vogue word in 1883, what did it mean?
A fussily dressed man
A fussily dressed man, a New York dandy, was the dude of 1883; the word then shifted to mean an Eastern city slicker holidaying out West, which is where the 'dude ranch' comes from.
Q 04The modern slang sense of "cool" is credited to which saxophonist?
Lester Young
Lester Young, the tenor star of Count Basie's band, is said to have spread 'cool' as praise among fellow musicians; he also named Billie Holiday 'Lady Day', and she called him 'Prez', the president.
Q 05"Bling bling" went mainstream after a 1999 B.G. single on which New Orleans label?
Cash Money
Cash Money released B.G.'s 'Bling Bling' in 1999 with the Hot Boys, Lil Wayne among them; the word spread so widely that mainstream dictionaries, Merriam-Webster among them, later gave it an entry.
Q 06Which New York landmark is the most popular explanation for the 1906 fad phrase '23 skidoo'?
The Flatiron Building
The Flatiron Building, at 23rd Street, funnelled gusts that lifted women's skirts; police supposedly told gawking men to 'skidoo', hence '23 skidoo'.
Q 07"The bee's knees" and "the cat's meow" were approving slang used by which fashionable young women?
Flappers
Flappers used both in the 1920s; their slang also included 'I have to see a man about a dog', a Prohibition-era excuse for slipping away to buy whiskey.
Q 08"Groovy" comes from which world before hippies got hold of it?
Jazz
Jazz musicians said a player was 'in the groove' when performing superbly, and 'groovy' grew out of that phrase decades before the 1960s counterculture adopted it as all-purpose praise.
Q 09Who voiced the 'gag me with a spoon' chatter on Frank Zappa's 1982 hit 'Valley Girl'?
His daughter Moon Unit
His daughter Moon Unit, then 14, improvised the monologue; Zappa meant the song to mock San Fernando Valley teenagers, but it became his biggest single and spread their slang far beyond Los Angeles.
Q 10In Cockney rhyming slang, what are a person's "plates of meat"?
Their feet
Their feet: 'plates of meat' rhymes with feet, and speakers usually drop the rhyming word, so tired feet are just 'plates', the way stairs become 'the apples' from apples and pears.
Q 11In the Cockney advice to "use your ___", the missing word is short for which rhyme for "head"?
Bread (loaf of bread)
Bread, as in loaf of bread, rhymes with head; speakers drop the rhyming word and keep only 'loaf', so 'use your loaf' simply means think.
Q 12What does a Cockney mean by a "Ruby Murray"?
A curry
A curry: Cockneys borrowed the name of Ruby Murray, a Northern Irish singer and 1950s chart star, purely because Murray rhymes with curry; she is said to have found the tribute amusing.
Q 13Traditionally, a true Cockney is someone born within earshot of which church's bells?
St Mary-le-Bow
Q 21Which British politician signed texts "LOL", believing it meant "lots of love"?
David Cameron
David Cameron signed some texts to Rebekah Brooks 'LOL' until she told him it meant 'laugh out loud', as she revealed to the Leveson Inquiry in 2012, a year after the Oxford English Dictionary listed the acronym.
Q 22The earliest known use of "OMG" is in a 1917 letter to which politician?
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill was sent it by Admiral Lord Fisher, who obligingly spelled it out, 'O.M.G. (Oh! My God!)', and later printed the letter in his own memoirs.
Q 23Which rapper's 2011 single 'The Motto' turned the acronym YOLO into a global catchphrase?
Drake
St Mary-le-Bow on Cheapside houses the Bow Bells; 'Cockney' is usually traced to Middle English cokeney, a 'cock's egg', first a taunt for a pampered child and later for soft townsfolk.
Q 14Polari, the secret slang of British gay men, reached a mass audience through which 1960s BBC radio comedy?
Round the Horne
Round the Horne's Julian and Sandy, played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams, peppered their sketches with Polari; that fame helped end its use as a secret code, and it faded after the law changed in 1967.
Q 15Which everyday British word is thought to come from Polari?
Naff
Naff, meaning dull or tacky, is thought to be Polari, in which a 'naff omi' was a dreary man; in 1982 Princess Anne was reported to have told photographers at a horse trial to 'naff off'.
Q 16What is an 'esky' in Australian slang?
A portable cooler
A portable cooler: 'esky' began as the Esky brand of the Sydney firm Malley's, used first on ice chests and then on a cool box for the car boot, and Australians now say it of any cooler.
Q 17The Australian slang word "yakka", meaning hard work, was borrowed from where?
Yagara, an Aboriginal tongue
Yagara, an Aboriginal tongue of the Brisbane region, supplied 'yaga', to work; recorded from the 1840s, it passed through colonial pidgin into Australian English and survives mostly in the phrase 'hard yakka'.
Q 18What is a "dunny" to a Sydneysider?
A toilet
A dunny is a toilet, originally an outdoor one; the word comes from the old British dialect term dunnekin for a privy.
Q 19In British English "pissed" usually means what?
Drunk
In Britain pissed means drunk, as in 'pissed as a newt'; Americans use it for annoyed, which is why 'pissed off' travels better.
Q 20Ask for a 'rubber' in an American office and you will most likely be understood to want what?
A condom
A condom is the American reading; in Britain a rubber is the thing on the end of a pencil, a gap that has confused generations of classrooms.
Drake's 2011 single 'The Motto', featuring Lil Wayne, turned 'you only live once' into a hook; a year later he grumbled that stores were selling YOLO merchandise without cutting him in.
Q 24The acronym FOMO was popularised by a 2004 article in the student magazine of which institution?
Harvard Business School
Harvard Business School student Patrick McGinnis wrote in its paper, The Harbus, that two fears ruled campus social life: FOMO and its twin FOBO, the fear of a better option.
Q 25Which word, Oxford's Word of the Year for 2013, was first recorded on an Australian online forum in 2002?
Selfie
Selfie first appeared when an Australian posted a blurry photo of the lip he split at a friend's 21st and apologised that 'it was a selfie'; twerk and binge-watch were on Oxford's shortlist that year.
Q 26Which emoji did Oxford Dictionaries name its Word of the Year for 2015?
The face-with-tears-of-joy emoji
The face-with-tears-of-joy emoji won because a study by Oxford and the keyboard firm SwiftKey found it was the most used emoji in the world that year.
Q 27Despite the echo of "emotion", the Japanese word "emoji" literally combines words meaning what?
Picture and character
Picture and character: e plus moji, so the likeness to 'emotion' and 'emoticon' is pure coincidence. Shigetaka Kurita drew a famous set of 176 for NTT DoCoMo in 1999.
Q 28In 1982 Scott Fahlman proposed which way to mark jokes online?
The sideways smiley :-)
The sideways smiley :-) was Fahlman's fix for jokes being taken seriously on a Carnegie Mellon bulletin board; in the same post he offered :-( for marking the remarks that were not jokes.
Q 29"Rizz", Oxford's Word of the Year for 2023, is thought to be a shortening of which word?
Charisma
Charisma: Oxford traces rizz to the word's middle syllable, a rare clipping like 'flu' from influenza; its use peaked in June 2023, when Tom Holland joked that he had 'limited rizz'.
Q 30Which streamer is credited with popularising "rizz" in 2021?
Kai Cenat
Kai Cenat, a Twitch streamer from New York, had been using rizz with his friends before he took it to his streams in 2021; TikTok then carried it everywhere.