Quiz

How to spell quiz

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce quiz

What does quiz mean?

1. nounA short test or set of questions used to check knowledge, often informally or for entertainment.
2. verbTo question someone closely, especially to test their knowledge or extract information.

Quiz in a sentence

• noun

  The pub ran a general knowledge quiz every Thursday evening.

• verb

  Reporters tried to quiz the minister about the missing funds.

• noun

  The teacher set a short quiz to check who had done the reading.

• verb

  My parents always quiz me about my plans for the weekend.

Where does quiz come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

Quiz is one of those words whose origin is genuinely murky, and honest dictionaries admit as much. It surfaced in English in the late 1700s, first recorded around 1782 meaning an odd or eccentric person, and soon after as a verb meaning to mock or to make fun of someone. A famous and entertaining story claims a Dublin theatre manager named Daly bet that he could introduce a meaningless new word into the language overnight by chalking 'quiz' all over the city, but there is no real evidence for this tale and it is almost certainly a later invention. The modern sense of a short informal test of knowledge did not settle in until the nineteenth century, probably influenced by 'inquisitive' and 'question', and the verb meaning to interrogate or examine grew alongside it. Because the word likely arose as slang rather than from any classical root, its spelling has always been simply the four letters it sounds like, which is why its plural doubles the z in 'quizzes'.

How the word is built

• quiz (single root word; no prefix or suffix, of obscure origin)