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49 free Word trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
42 free word trivia questions with answers. Every word has a backstory, and some of them are better than the things they describe. This word trivia quiz covers etymologies (why a salary is salty, what avocado meant in Nahuatl, which Czech play gave us robot, who Captain Boycott was), the words with no rhyme, the longest words in the dictionary, palindromes and pangrams, portmanteaus, spoonerisms and malapropisms, and the people and books behind the OED and Webster's. It also covers the games: how Scrabble's letter values were worked out, who made Wordle and why the New York Times bought it, what the first Spelling Bee winner had to spell, and, since this is a trivia site, where the word 'trivia' comes from. Difficulty runs from easy pub-quiz staples to genuinely obscure lexicography. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the words, games and dictionaries involved, and each question carries its source. No folk etymologies passed off as fact.
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Q 01The word 'trivia' comes from Latin 'triviae', which literally meant what?
Three roads
A spot where three roads met was a public place, so 'trivialis' came to mean commonplace; the modern quiz sense dates only from 1960s college contests.
Q 02Bread with a filling is named after an 18th-century English aristocrat with what title?
The Earl of Sandwich
John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, reputedly asked for meat between bread so he could keep gaming without leaving the table, and the dish took his title.
Q 03'Quarantine' comes from the Venetian word for what period of time?
Forty days
Venetian 'quaranta giorni' means forty days, the period ships from plague ports were held offshore before anyone could land; Ragusa had begun with a thirty-day 'trentino' in 1377.
Q 04The word 'salary' derives from the Latin word for which substance?
Salt
'Salarium' comes from Latin 'sal', salt; Pliny linked the soldiers' allowance to salt, though whether they were literally paid in salt is disputed.
Q 05The 'mare' in 'nightmare' originally referred to what?
A chest-sitting demon
The word has no etymological link to the horse; the folkloric mare brought frightening dreams by pressing on the sleeper.
Q 06The word 'robot' entered English from a 1920 play written in which language?
Czech
Karel Čapek's Czech play R.U.R. (1920) introduced 'robot'; he credited his brother Josef with coining it from 'robota', the Czech word for forced labour.
Q 07'Sabotage' comes from a French word for what item?
A wooden shoe
'Sabot' is a French wooden shoe; 'saboter' first meant to clatter in clogs or bungle work, and the tale of workers throwing shoes into machinery is probably apocryphal.
Q 08'Avocado' traces back to a Nahuatl word that also served as the word for what?
Testicle
Molina's 16th-century Nahuatl dictionary glosses 'ahuacatl' as both the fruit and the testicle; Spanish 'aguacate' and then English 'avocado' followed.
Q 09'Muscle' comes from the Latin 'musculus', meaning what?
Little mouse
A flexed biceps was thought to look like a mouse moving under the skin.
Q 10According to the most accepted theory, 'OK' began in the late 1830s as a jokey abbreviation of what?
'Oll korrect'
Boston newspapers in 1839 used 'o.k.' for the jokey misspelling 'oll korrect'; the 1840 Van Buren campaign's 'Old Kinderhook' clubs then spread it nationally.
Q 11What is the name for the dot above a lowercase i or j?
Tittle
The tittle is the small dot above lowercase i and j; the word survives in the biblical phrase 'one jot or one tittle' (Matthew 5:18).
Q 12What is the longest non-technical dictionary word, meaning "the act of estimating something as worthless"?
Floccinaucinihilipilification
'Floccinaucinihilipilification' strings together Latin words for 'nothing' (flocci, nauci, nihili, pili); William Shenstone used it in a 1741 letter.
Q 13Roughly how many letters long is the full chemical name of the protein titin?
189,800
Titin's systematic name runs to about 189,800 letters (189,819 by the usual count), listing every amino acid; dictionaries exclude such open-ended chemical nomenclature.
Q 21Which 1486 English text popularised fanciful animal collective nouns such as an 'exaltation' of larks?
The Book of Saint Albans
The Book of Saint Albans (1486) printed a long list of 'terms of venery' including an 'exaltation' of larks and a 'gaggle' of geese; Wynkyn de Worde's 1496 reprint spread them further.
Q 22Which American architect invented Scrabble, valuing letters by their frequency in newspapers?
Alfred Mosher Butts
Alfred Mosher Butts, an out-of-work architect, devised Lexiko in 1931 and Criss-Crosswords in 1938, counting letters on the New York Times front page; James Brunot renamed it Scrabble in 1948.
Q 23Which two letters are worth 10 points each in English Scrabble?
Q and Z
Q 14Who introduced the word 'palindrome' to English in 1638?
Henry Peacham
Henry Peacham's 1638 'The Truth of Our Times' gives the word's first recorded English use; the concept is far older, as the first-century Sator Square shows.
Q 15'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' is the best-known English example of what?
A pangram
A pangram uses every letter of the alphabet; Western Union used this one to test telex equipment, and the novel Ella Minnow Pea hunts for a shorter one.
Q 16'Brunch' and 'smog' are examples of what kind of word?
Portmanteaus
Portmanteaus were popularised by Lewis Carroll through Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass, who explains 'slithy' as lithe plus slimy.
Q 17'Boycott' is named after Captain Charles Boycott, a land agent shunned in which country in 1880?
Ireland
Boycott was a land agent in County Mayo, Ireland; Charles Stewart Parnell urged the Land League to shun such men, and the surname became a verb within months.
Q 18'Silhouette' takes its name from Étienne de Silhouette, who held what job in 1759 France?
Finance minister
Silhouette was Louis XV's finance minister (Controller-General) in 1759; his Seven Years' War austerity measures made his name a byword for anything cheap, like a cut-paper shadow portrait.
Q 19A word like 'cleave' or 'sanction' that can mean its own opposite is called what?
A contronym
A contronym (also 'Janus word', after the two-faced Roman god) carries opposite senses: 'cleave' means both split and cling, 'sanction' both permit and penalise.
Q 20Which fruit is the classic example of an English word with no perfect rhyme?
Orange
Orange has no perfect rhyme in standard English; poets resort to near-rhymes such as 'door hinge', and the Welsh hill Blorenge is the famous proper-noun exception.
Q and Z are the only ten-point tiles in English Scrabble; J and X score eight, K five, and the common letters E, A, I, O, N, R, T, L, S and U just one.
Q 24Wordle was created by a Welsh software engineer with what surname?
Wardle
Wardle built it for his partner and released it publicly in October 2021; the Times paid a 'low seven-figure sum'.
Q 25How many attempts does a Wordle player get to guess the five-letter word?
Six
The shareable grid of coloured emoji squares, added late in 2021, is what turned it into a worldwide habit.
Q 26In which year did the Oxford English Dictionary begin publication?
1884
The first fascicle, A to Ant, appeared in 1884 under James Murray; the Philological Society had begun the project in 1857, and the 1989 second edition ran to 20 volumes.
Q 27Which children's author gave us the first recorded use of the word 'nerd', in 1950?
Dr. Seuss
Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo (1950) lists a 'Nerd' among the creatures Gerald McGrew wants to collect; the slang sense surfaced in Newsweek the next year.
Q 28Which word did Frank Neuhauser spell to win the very first National Spelling Bee in 1925?
Gladiolus
Eleven-year-old Frank Neuhauser spelled 'gladiolus' to win the 1925 bee, which the Louisville Courier-Journal had organised by consolidating local contests.
Q 29The ampersand was once commonly recited as the 27th letter of what?
The English alphabet
Its shape is a ligature of the Latin 'et', and its name comes from children chanting 'and per se and' at the end of the alphabet.
Q 30The placeholder text 'Lorem ipsum' is a scrambled passage from which Roman writer?
Cicero
The passage is mangled from Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum (45 BC), as Richard McClintock showed; Letraset transfer sheets made it standard in the 1960s.