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50 free Spelling trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
40 free Spelling trivia questions with answers. Spelling trivia for teachers, quiz nights and anyone who has ever hesitated over 'definitely'. The quiz mixes three things: the history of spelling bees (why a bee is a bee, the boy who won the first national bee with 'gladiolus', the year eight champions shared the trophy), the quirks of English spelling itself (ghoti, ough, the i-before-e rule and its embarrassing exceptions, the Great Vowel Shift, Noah Webster's color and center) and straight spelling tests on the words people actually get wrong most often - accommodate, occurrence, minuscule, supersede and, fittingly, misspell. About a third of the questions are easy enough for a classroom; the later ones - the 1855 letter that first coined ghoti, the 1932 study that measured how bad the i-before-e rule really is, the 45-letter lung disease invented as a hoax - will stretch a champion speller. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question shows its citation.
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Q 01Which word did 11-year-old Frank Neuhauser spell to win the first National Spelling Bee in 1925?
Gladiolus
The bee was started by the Louisville Courier-Journal as a merger of local contests; Scripps took over sponsorship in 1941.
Q 02Which newspaper founded the National Spelling Bee in 1925?
The Louisville Courier-Journal
The E. W. Scripps Company has run it since 1941; the finals are held near Washington, D.C. each late May or early June.
Q 03How many contestants shared the Scripps National Spelling Bee title in 2019, when the word list ran out?
Eight
The 'octochamps' prompted a new spell-off tiebreaker from 2021: spell as many words as you can in 90 seconds.
Q 042021 spelling bee champion Zaila Avant-garde also holds Guinness records in which sport?
Basketball
She won with 'murraya'; first prize is $50,000.
Q 05Which 1985 champion began the long run of Indian American winners at the National Spelling Bee?
Balu Natarajan
Nupur Lala's 1999 win was later featured in the documentary Spellbound.
Q 06Under Scripps rules, a speller must be under 15 and must not have gone beyond which year of school?
Eighth grade
The finals feature vocabulary questions as well as spelling since the 2010s.
Q 07Which 2006 Keke Palmer film is about a South Los Angeles girl in the National Spelling Bee?
Akeelah and the Bee
Spellbound was the 2002 documentary that followed eight real spellers to the finals.
Q 08The 'bee' in spelling bee comes from an old word for what?
A gathering to share work
It probably derives from a dialect word 'been' meaning help given by neighbours; 'spelling match' is recorded from 1808 and 'spelling bee' from 1850.
Q 09Which organisation held the first countrywide US spelling bee, in Cleveland in 1908?
The National Education Association
That contest did not become annual; the continuous national bee dates from 1925.
Q 10The made-up word 'ghoti' is meant to be pronounced like which English word?
Fish
gh as in tough, o as in women, ti as in nation; the joke is often pinned on George Bernard Shaw but is older.
Q 11The earliest known use of 'ghoti' appears in an 1855 letter from Charles Ollier to which writer?
Leigh Hunt
Ollier's son William had proposed the spelling; James Joyce alluded to it in Finnegans Wake and it is the Klingon word for fish.
Q 12What is a four-letter combination like 'ough', with its many pronunciations, called?
A tetragraph
The two-letter 'ou' alone can stand for nine different vowel sounds depending on the word.
Q 13English spelling largely froze in the late 15th century, just before which change to long vowels?
The Great Vowel Shift
The arrival of printing fixed Middle English spellings just as the vowels moved, which is why 'name' no longer rhymes with 'calm'.
Q 21Which is the correct spelling of the word meaning 'without doubt'?
Definitely
Mispronunciation is one of the biggest causes of misspelling; 'defiantly' is a real word that autocorrect loves to substitute.
Q 22Which is the correct spelling of the word meaning 'to provide lodging'?
Accommodate
Two c's and two m's; doubled consonants are one of the most common traps in English.
Q 23Which is the correct spelling of the word meaning 'to keep apart'?
Separate
A useful trick: there is 'a rat' in separate.
Which is the correct spelling of the word meaning 'very small'?
Q 14Which country has an official academy that regulates spelling, something England has never had?
France
The lack of an English equivalent to the Academie francaise is one reason spelling reform never stuck.
Q 15Noah Webster popularised American spellings such as color and center by doing what?
Choosing already existing variants
Critics point out he did not originate them; his 1828 dictionary listed 70,000 words, 12,000 never before in a dictionary.
Q 16Webster's Blue-Backed Speller of 1783 had sold roughly how many copies by 1890?
60 million
It was the most popular American book of its time and drilled generations of schoolchildren in spelling.
Q 17How old was Noah Webster when An American Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1828?
70
He had begun the work in 1807 and finished the manuscript in Cambridge, England, in January 1825.
Q 18The 'i before e except after c' rule first appeared in print in a spelling manual of which year?
1866
James Stuart Laurie's Manual of English Spelling; the longer version adds 'or when sounded like A, as in neighbor and weigh'.
Q 19Which of these words obeys the 'i before e except after c' rule?
Receive
Weird and seize break it with no c; species and science break it by keeping ie after c.
Q 20In 2009 which body advised that 'the i before e except after c rule is not worth teaching'?
The UK Department for Education
Leonard Wheat's 1932 study of 3,876 words had already found the rule's exceptions outweighed its usefulness.
Minuscule
It comes from the Latin minusculus, related to minus, not to 'mini'.
Q 25Which is the correct spelling of the word meaning 'to replace'?
Supersede
It is the only common English word ending in -sede; proceed and succeed take -ceed, and precede takes -cede.
Q 26Which is the correct spelling of the word meaning 'an instance of something happening'?
Occurrence
Double r and double... no, single e: occur, occurred, occurrence.
Q 27Which is the correct spelling of the thousand-year period?
Millennium
Two l's and two n's, from Latin mille (thousand) and annus (year).
Q 28Which is the correct spelling of the word for a go-between?
Liaison
The French loanword keeps its double i; it is a frequent flyer on lists of misspelled words.
Q 29Which is the correct spelling of the word meaning 'to make someone feel awkward'?
Embarrass
Two r's and two s's; the French embarras has only one s.
Q 30Which is the correct spelling of the verb meaning to spell a word wrongly?
Misspell
The word is famously misspelled itself: mis + spell keeps both s's.