How to run it: five decisions before the first question
Decide how many questions you are running before you choose any of them. Twenty questions is a game you can finish while people are still eating. Forty is an evening with a winner. Seventy-five is not a quiz, it is a page to pull from — nobody should read all of this out in one sitting. The rounds below are sized so that one whole round, or the first ten of two different rounds, both give you something coherent.
Budget about a minute a question and then add a quarter. Reading a question twice, waiting for a table of six to argue, and reading the answer with its one-line reason lands closer to seventy-five seconds than sixty, and that is before anyone goes to the kitchen. Twenty questions is half an hour. Forty is a little over an hour, which is roughly as long as a room will stay with you without a break.
Then pick by round rather than by subject. The common mistake is choosing a topic — a music round, a geography round — when the thing that actually decides whether a quiz works is difficulty matched to the room. Four friends of twenty years and a table of colleagues who have never eaten together need different questions about the same world.
| The group you have | Run this | Skip this |
|---|---|---|
| Mixed party, people still arriving | Round 1, then Round 2 | Round 4 — it empties a loose room |
| Four or five close friends | Rounds 2 and 3 | Round 1, they will be insulted |
| Work social, mixed ages | The Work-Social Round, then Round 2 | The Dinner-Party Round — it needs a table |
| Dinner for six | The Dinner-Party Round | Anything scored |
| Two teams, a real competition | Rounds 1 to 3 in order, Round 4 last | Nothing |
| Level after everything | The tiebreakers | Another ordinary question |
Read every question twice and never a third time. Either say the answer straight after each question, which suits a loose and talkative group, or hold the answers to the end of the round, which suits scoring — but do not switch mid-round, because that is what makes a quiz feel disorganised. The one-line reason under each answer is written to be read aloud. It is the difference between a room that says oh and a room that says wait, really?, and it buys you the ten seconds you need to find your place on the page again.
One rule, set before the first question: the answer on the page is final. Somebody will be wrong about something tonight, quite possibly you, and the version of the evening where that gets litigated is worse than the version where it does not.
Round 1 — The Opener (15 questions)
Fifteen questions most adults in the room will get two-thirds of. These are not children's questions dressed up; they are the things an adult absorbs by living — airports, currencies, the abbreviation at the foot of an invitation, the Latin in a work email, the two numbers a nurse reads off a blood-pressure cuff. The point of an opener is to get people answering out loud. A table that gets the first three right will guess at the next thirty. A table that gets the first three wrong goes quiet and stays quiet.
If the room is sharp — and you can tell inside four questions — cut this round short rather than finishing it out of tidiness. Nobody has ever complained that a warm-up was too brief.
Q1.Which US city is served by O'Hare International Airport?Tap to reveal
Answer: Chicago
It is named after Edward "Butch" O'Hare, a naval aviator killed in 1943.
Q2.What is the currency of Switzerland?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Swiss franc
Switzerland stayed outside the euro, so its franc survived where the French and Belgian francs did not.
Q3.Who wrote the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four?Tap to reveal
Answer: George Orwell
Published in 1949; Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair.
Q4.What does "RSVP" on an invitation stand for?Tap to reveal
Answer: Répondez s'il vous plaît — French for "please reply"
It is an instruction, not a courtesy, which is why hosts find the silence so annoying.
Q5.How many cards are in a standard deck including both jokers?Tap to reveal
Answer: 54
Fifty-two ranked cards plus two jokers, which entered the pack with the game of euchre in the 1860s.
Q6.Schiphol is the main airport of which European capital?Tap to reveal
Answer: Amsterdam
It sits on the bed of a drained lake, several metres below sea level.
Q7.What does the acronym NASA stand for?Tap to reveal
Answer: National Aeronautics and Space Administration
It was created in 1958 as a civilian agency, which is why its remit is explicitly not military.
Q8.In a written sentence, what does the abbreviation "i.e." stand for?Tap to reveal
Answer: Id est — Latin for "that is"
It restates what came before; "e.g." is exempli gratia and gives an example instead.
Q9.What is the longest side of a right-angled triangle called?Tap to reveal
Answer: The hypotenuse
Greek for "stretching under" — the side stretched under the right angle.
Q10.What is the currency of Poland?Tap to reveal
Answer: The złoty
The name simply means "golden", and it divides into a hundred groszy.
Q11.A blood pressure reading has two numbers — what does the higher one measure?Tap to reveal
Answer: The pressure as the heart contracts, the systolic pressure
The lower figure, the diastolic, is the pressure left in the arteries between beats.
Q12.On a loan or credit card, what does APR stand for?Tap to reveal
Answer: Annual percentage rate
It folds the compulsory fees in with the interest, which is what makes two offers comparable.
Q13.What does a sommelier serve?Tap to reveal
Answer: Wine
The word originally meant the servant in charge of a household's provisions and its pack animals.
Q14.White burgundy from Chablis is made from which grape?Tap to reveal
Answer: Chardonnay
By law it is the only grape permitted there, so every bottle of Chablis is unblended Chardonnay.
Q15.Which Italian city is built across a lagoon, with canals for streets?Tap to reveal
Answer: Venice
It sits on roughly 118 small islands, built up on wooden piles driven into the mud.
Round 2 — The Middle (11 questions)
Eleven questions where about half the room knows the answer and the other half nearly does. This is the body of any adult quiz and the round to use if you only use one. The spread is deliberate — an element, an opera, a sea, a planet, a tooth, a war. Nobody at the table is strong across all of it, which is the entire reason team quizzes work.
Watch for the questions people get wrong confidently rather than hesitantly. The war the Treaty of Versailles ended and the planet with the shortest day both produce fast, certain, wrong answers, and those are the ones people remember the round for.
Q1.Which element has the chemical symbol K?Tap to reveal
Answer: Potassium
From kalium, the Latinised Arabic for plant ash; the English name comes from "potash".
Q2.Which sea separates Saudi Arabia from Egypt?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Red Sea
The Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba are its two northern arms, split by the Sinai.
Q3.How many lines does a musical stave have?Tap to reveal
Answer: Five
Five became standard in the Renaissance; earlier plainchant was written on four.
Q4.Which country was formerly called Ceylon?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sri Lanka
It took the new name in 1972, on becoming a republic.
Q5.What does the Richter scale measure?Tap to reveal
Answer: Earthquake magnitude
It is logarithmic, so each whole step up is roughly thirty times more energy released.
Q6.Who composed the opera The Marriage of Figaro?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mozart
First staged in 1786, from a Beaumarchais play that had been banned in Vienna.
Q7.What is the hard outer covering of a tooth called?Tap to reveal
Answer: Enamel
The hardest substance the body makes, and once it is worn away the body has no way to grow it back.
Q8.Which war was formally ended by the Treaty of Versailles?Tap to reveal
Answer: The First World War
Signed in June 1919 — seven months after the armistice had already stopped the fighting.
Q9.Which letter comes last in the Greek alphabet?Tap to reveal
Answer: Omega
It literally means "big O"; omicron, further up the alphabet, is "small O".
Q10.Which planet has the shortest day?Tap to reveal
Answer: Jupiter
It turns once in under ten hours, despite being the largest planet in the solar system.
Q11.What kind of animal is a natterjack?Tap to reveal
Answer: A toad
Europe's running toad — it sprints in short bursts instead of hopping.
Round 3 — Splits the Room (16 questions)
Sixteen questions that divide a table cleanly. Everything here is reachable: if you do not know the answer you will still recognise it, and the usual reaction is irritation at not having retrieved it rather than a blank. That distinction matters more than raw difficulty. A question that is hard but recognisable keeps people playing; a question nobody has ever heard of ends the round.
Run this third, after the middle round, or on its own if the group is genuinely well read. Do not open with it. Five minutes of unanswerable questions at the start of an evening is how a quiz quietly becomes a conversation about something else.
Q1.Which two elements make up over 95% of the Sun's mass?Tap to reveal
Answer: Hydrogen and helium
Roughly three-quarters hydrogen to a quarter helium, with everything else a rounding error.
Q2.Which is the shortest of Shakespeare's plays?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Comedy of Errors
Just under 1,800 lines, against roughly 4,000 for Hamlet, the longest of the plays.
Q3.Who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize?Tap to reveal
Answer: Marie Curie
Physics in 1903, shared with two others; she won Chemistry outright in 1911.
Q4.Who proposed the theory of continental drift in 1912?Tap to reveal
Answer: Alfred Wegener
He was dismissed for decades because he could not name a mechanism; plate tectonics supplied one in the 1960s.
Q5.In heraldry, which colour is called "gules"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Red
From the Old French for throat, by way of the red-dyed fur trimming at a garment's neck.
Q6.Which city hosted the first modern Olympic Games?Tap to reveal
Answer: Athens
In 1896, with fourteen nations taking part — a field smaller than a single modern event.
Q7.What is the capital of Western Australia?Tap to reveal
Answer: Perth
Often called the most isolated big city on earth: the nearest comparable one is over two thousand kilometres away.
Q8.Which novel opens with Colonel Aureliano Buendía facing a firing squad?Tap to reveal
Answer: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez, 1967 — the founding book of the Latin American boom.
Q9.Which empire was ruled from the city of Tenochtitlan?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Aztec empire
It stood on an island in Lake Texcoco, where Mexico City is now.
Q10.In cooking, what does it mean to blanch a vegetable?Tap to reveal
Answer: Boil it briefly, then plunge it into iced water
The ice bath stops the cooking dead, which is what fixes the colour.
Q11.Which gas makes up about 1% of the atmosphere, after nitrogen and oxygen?Tap to reveal
Answer: Argon
A noble gas and almost completely inert, which is why old light bulbs were filled with it.
Q12.Who composed The Rite of Spring?Tap to reveal
Answer: Igor Stravinsky
Its 1913 Paris premiere caused such uproar that the dancers could not hear the orchestra.
Q13.Which line of latitude sits at roughly 23.5 degrees north?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Tropic of Cancer
It marks the furthest north the Sun can ever be directly overhead.
Q14.Who wrote the play A Doll's House?Tap to reveal
Answer: Henrik Ibsen
From 1879; the ending was so scandalous that Ibsen wrote a softer alternative for German theatres.
Q15.What are the three classical orders of Greek architecture?Tap to reveal
Answer: Doric, Ionic and Corinthian
Quickest told apart by the capital at the top of the column: plain, scrolled, or leafy.
Q16.Which disease was declared eradicated worldwide in 1980?Tap to reveal
Answer: Smallpox
The only human disease ever eradicated; its last natural case was recorded in Somalia in 1977.
Round 4 — The Deciders (10 questions)
Ten questions for the end of a close game and nothing else. The register changes here: these want one specific fact rather than a general feel for a subject, and a table of six should expect three or four. That is the correct score, not a failure. If your group is taking eight of these, you have a pub-quiz team on your hands and you want our hard trivia questions instead.
Ten is about the most you should ever use consecutively and six is better. Hard questions reward a room that is already engaged — they cannot create engagement, and used early they destroy it.
Q1.What is the apparent shift in a star's position caused by Earth's orbit called?Tap to reveal
Answer: Parallax
A parsec is defined as the distance at which that shift measures one arcsecond.
Q2.Who was Roman emperor when Vesuvius buried Pompeii?Tap to reveal
Answer: Titus
The eruption of 79 AD came within months of him succeeding his father Vespasian.
Q3.What are the three bones of the middle ear called?Tap to reveal
Answer: The malleus, incus and stapes
Hammer, anvil and stirrup — and the stapes is the smallest bone in the body.
Q4.Who wrote the 1842 novel Dead Souls?Tap to reveal
Answer: Nikolai Gogol
He burned most of the second part shortly before his death, so the novel survives unfinished.
Q5.What is the point on the surface directly above an earthquake's origin called?Tap to reveal
Answer: The epicentre
The origin itself is the focus, or hypocentre, often tens of kilometres down.
Q6.Whose "last theorem" went unproven for more than 350 years?Tap to reveal
Answer: Pierre de Fermat
He claimed a proof in a book margin in the 1630s; Andrew Wiles's was accepted in the mid-1990s.
Q7.Which city was the capital of the Byzantine Empire?Tap to reveal
Answer: Constantinople
Founded as Byzantium, refounded by Constantine in 330, and now Istanbul.
Q8.What is the study of flags called?Tap to reveal
Answer: Vexillology
From vexillum, the standard carried by Roman cavalry.
Q9.Which two countries fought the Winter War of 1939–40?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Soviet Union and Finland
Finland gave up territory but kept its independence, which almost nobody expected.
Q10.In chemistry, what is an allotrope?Tap to reveal
Answer: A different structural form of the same element
Diamond and graphite are both nothing but carbon, arranged differently.
The Dinner-Party Round: 8 questions worth answering out loud
Eight questions whose answers are the point. These are not scored and barely a quiz: each one is something a guest can be wrong about pleasantly, and each answer hands the table something to do with it. They suit food, where the rhythm is a question every few minutes rather than one a minute.
Half of them are about the ordinary things already in front of you — the bread, the onions, the hour on the clock — which is why they land better at a table than at a bar. If you want the scored, timed, teams-and-answer-sheets version instead, that is bar trivia.
Q1.Why is the Pacific Ocean called "pacific"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Magellan found it calm after a brutal crossing of the straits
He named it Mar Pacifico in 1520, which says more about the weather behind him than ahead.
Q2.What were the dimples on a golf ball originally copying?Tap to reveal
Answer: The scuffs on worn-out balls
Players noticed battered old balls flew further than smooth new ones, so makers reproduced the damage.
Q3.Why does chopping an onion make you cry?Tap to reveal
Answer: It releases a volatile sulphur compound that irritates the eye
Cutting ruptures the cells, letting an enzyme and a sulphur precursor meet and form the gas.
Q4.What does the "Mc" in Scottish and Irish surnames mean?Tap to reveal
Answer: Son of
Mac and Mc are the same word shortened; the O' in Irish names means grandson or descendant.
Q5.Why is a ship's speed measured in knots?Tap to reveal
Answer: A knotted rope was paid out behind the ship and timed
Counting the knots that ran out in a fixed interval gave the speed straight off the line.
Q6.Why are there 60 minutes in an hour rather than 100?Tap to reveal
Answer: We inherited Babylonian counting in sixties
Sixty divides cleanly by 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 — very handy before anyone had decimal fractions.
Q7.What is the difference between a bay and a gulf?Tap to reveal
Answer: Convention, not geology
There is no formal threshold; a gulf is usually bigger and more enclosed, but the naming is historical.
Q8.Why does bread go stale faster in the fridge than on the counter?Tap to reveal
Answer: Its starch recrystallises fastest just above freezing
That is why the freezer is kinder to a loaf than the fridge is.
The Work-Social Round: 9 questions that are safe among colleagues
Nine questions that work in a room of colleagues, which is a narrower category than it looks. A question about drinking excludes the people who do not. A question about children excludes the people who do not have them and quietly pokes the people who wanted them. A question from one country's school syllabus hands the round to whoever grew up there. Religion and politics have no place in a quiz run by the person who signs off expenses.
What is left is larger than it sounds: the history buried inside office words. Everyone in the room uses email, meetings, deadlines and documents all day, so everyone has a route in, and the answers are the sort of thing people repeat the next morning. That is the real goal of a work quiz — not a winner, but ten minutes somebody mentions afterwards.
Below about twelve people, read these without teams. Teams at a work social sort themselves by who already knows whom, which is the opposite of the point.
Q1.What does the "CC" field in an email stand for?Tap to reveal
Answer: Carbon copy
From the sheet of carbon paper a typist laid between pages to produce a duplicate.
Q2.Which keyboard layout is named after its own first six letters?Tap to reveal
Answer: QWERTY
Patented in the 1870s, and it has outlived every attempt to replace it with something faster.
Q3.Unwanted bulk email took its nickname from which comedy sketch?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Monty Python spam sketch
In it the word is repeated until nothing else can be heard, which was exactly the early users' joke.
Q4.In project management, what is the "critical path"?Tap to reveal
Answer: The longest chain of dependent tasks
Speeding up anything off that chain does not move the finish date by a single day.
Q5.What is the term for an abbreviation pronounced as a word, such as "laser"?Tap to reveal
Answer: An acronym
Initialisms like FBI are spelled out letter by letter; acronyms are said as words.
Q6.In target archery, what colour is the innermost ring?Tap to reveal
Answer: Gold
Everyone calls it the bullseye, but the centre of a World Archery target is gold rather than black or red.
Q7.A "deadline" originally referred to what?Tap to reveal
Answer: A line prisoners were shot for crossing
A grim nineteenth-century prison-camp term that drifted into newspapers and then into offices.
Q8.In typography, what is adjusting the space between one specific pair of letters called?Tap to reveal
Answer: Kerning
Tracking changes the spacing across a whole run of text; kerning fixes a single pair.
Q9.What is a quorum?Tap to reveal
Answer: The minimum attendance for a meeting's decisions to count
Latin for "of whom", taken from the opening words of the old writ summoning officials.
Tiebreakers: six questions where nearest wins
Six questions with a number for an answer, to be used once, when two teams finish level. Nearest wins and nobody argues, which is the only property a tiebreaker actually needs. Ordinary questions make poor tiebreakers, because both teams getting it wrong leaves you exactly where you started.
Every figure below is one almost nobody carries exactly but anybody can bracket, and that is the whole test. A date or a formula is no use here — a year is either remembered or not, and five sides times 180 is a sum, so both teams land on the same answer and you are no further forward than before.
Ask for the number written down rather than shouted, collect both at the same moment, and read the true answer before you name the winner. Doing it in that order is what makes the result feel decided rather than awarded.
Q1.How long is the Suez Canal, in kilometres?Tap to reveal
Answer: About 193
It needs no locks, because the Mediterranean and the Red Sea sit at nearly the same level.
Q2.How far is it around the Earth at the equator, in kilometres?Tap to reveal
Answer: About 40,075
The metre was originally defined off this measurement, which is why the number is so close to a round forty thousand.
Q3.How many years did the Hundred Years' War actually last?Tap to reveal
Answer: 116
It ran from 1337 to 1453, in bursts of fighting separated by long truces.
Q4.How far is it from London to New York in a straight line, in kilometres?Tap to reveal
Answer: About 5,570
Roughly 3,460 miles — and the flight home takes longer because it runs into the jet stream.
Q5.How far is the Moon from Earth on average, in kilometres?Tap to reveal
Answer: About 384,400
Its orbit is an ellipse, so the real figure swings by some twenty thousand kilometres either way.
Q6.How many litres of blood are there in an average adult?Tap to reveal
Answer: About 5
Roughly a thirteenth of body weight, which is why a standard donation of under half a litre is easily spared.
What to cut, and what to do when a table stops guessing
Three kinds of question will be sitting in whatever list you pull from elsewhere, and all three should go. The first is anything whose answer is still moving — a record holder, a reigning champion, a biggest or tallest or newest. These age badly and they age invisibly. A question that was right eighteen months ago is simply wrong now, and you will not find out until somebody at the table corrects you. Every question on this page was picked because its answer settled years ago and has stayed settled.
The second is the question with two defensible answers. Who invented the telephone and what is the longest river in the world each have a textbook answer and a serious case against it, and neither belongs in a scored round. Keep them for the dinner table, where being argued with is the entire point.
The third is the question that only works if you already know it: no route in, no way to narrow it down, and nothing interesting about the answer once you hear it. A good hard question has a path — you reason from a half-memory to a guess and feel clever when it lands. A bad hard question is a locked door, and a round of locked doors is how a table learns to stop answering.
When a table does go quiet, the fix is not an easier question; it is a question the quiet people can answer. Food, language, the body and the objects in the room are the four subjects where nearly everybody has something, which is why they are spread through every round above rather than gathered into one. And if a round dies anyway, stop scoring and read the rest out as facts — a quiz that turns into a conversation has not failed, it has changed format. If you are running proper teams, the five minutes spent on trivia team names reliably gets a laugh before a single question is read, and trivia night ideas covers the hosting side in more depth than this page does.
And when the page runs out but the room has not, the Trivio app plays questions of this kind against real opponents in timed rounds, which is the one thing a printed list cannot do.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many trivia questions do you need for an adult party?
Twenty for something short you can finish while people eat, forty for an evening that produces a winner. Budget about seventy-five seconds per question once you include reading it twice, letting a table argue, and reading the answer out. That makes twenty questions half an hour and forty questions a little over an hour, which is roughly the limit before a room wants a break.
What makes a trivia question suitable for adults rather than children?
Not difficulty — register. Children's questions are drawn from a school syllabus; adult questions are drawn from the world an adult has lived in, so airports, currencies, wine, surnames, office words and anatomy all work where a worksheet question on the water cycle does not. A hard children's question is still a children's question, and a room of adults can tell inside two seconds.
How hard should trivia questions for adults be?
Aim for about half the room knowing the answer to most questions. That is the level where people keep guessing. Put a handful of genuinely hard ones at the end, where getting three or four out of ten is a good score, and keep the warm-up short. The failure mode to avoid is not a quiz that is too easy — it is a table that has stopped answering.
What trivia questions should be avoided at a work event?
Anything about drinking, anything that assumes having children, anything from one country's school syllabus, and anything touching religion or politics. Each of those quietly excludes part of the room or hands the round to one group. Questions about the origins of everyday office words — carbon copy, deadline, quorum, spam — give everyone present an equal route in.
Do adult trivia questions need teams?
Under about twelve people, no — read the questions to the room and let people shout. Above that, teams of four to six work better, because a large room answering individually means most people never get heard. At a work social specifically, individual play is often better even with a bigger group, since teams tend to form around who already knows whom.
How do you settle a tie in a trivia quiz?
Use a question with a number for an answer and give it to whoever is nearest, rather than asking another ordinary question that both teams may get wrong. Pick a figure nobody holds exactly but everybody can bracket — a canal's length, a distance, a span of years — because a date or a formula is exact-or-nothing and settles nothing. Take the answers in writing and collect them simultaneously so nobody hears the other guess, then read the true figure before announcing the winner.
