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Hard general knowledge quiz
Twelve questions where your first instinct is usually wrong.
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General knowledge · 12 questions
Hard words and language quiz
A challenger round for word nerds. Spelling bees were just the warm-up.
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Question 1 of 12
Tough question
What is a group of crows called?
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- 1. What is a group of crows called?
- A. A parliament
- B. A murder (answer)
- C. A conspiracy
- D. An unkindness
A parliament is owls and an unkindness is ravens. - 2. What does 'sesquipedalian' describe?
- A. Using long words (answer)
- B. A fear of feet
- C. Half a century
- D. A type of poem
It comes from Latin for 'a foot and a half long'. - 3. What is an interrobang?
- A. A combined ? and ! (answer)
- B. A double hyphen
- C. An upside-down comma
- D. A sideways semicolon
It was invented by an American advertising executive in 1962. - 4. The word 'robot' comes from which language?
- A. German
- B. Russian
- C. Czech (answer)
- D. Polish
It was coined for Karel Čapek's 1920 play R.U.R. - 5. Which plural of 'octopus' follows its Greek origin?
- A. Octopi
- B. Octopodes (answer)
- C. Octopae
- D. Octopuses
Octopuses is the standard plural; octopi wrongly treats the word as Latin. - 6. What is the dot over a lowercase i called?
- A. A tittle (answer)
- B. A jot
- C. A serif
- D. A kern
Hence the old phrase 'every jot and tittle', meaning every last detail. - 7. The word 'quarantine' comes from the Italian for which number?
- A. Fourteen
- B. Twenty
- C. Forty (answer)
- D. Ninety
Ships in Venice had to wait quaranta giorni, forty days, before landing. - 8. What is 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' an example of?
- A. A palindrome
- B. A pangram (answer)
- C. An anagram
- D. A lipogram
A pangram uses every letter of the alphabet. - 9. Which word means a fear of long words?
- A. Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia (answer)
- B. Arachibutyrophobia
- C. Triskaidekaphobia
- D. Logophobia
Cruelly, it is one of the longest words in the dictionary. - 10. In Middle English, the word 'nice' originally meant what?
- A. Foolish (answer)
- B. Kind
- C. Wealthy
- D. Tidy
It comes from the Latin nescius, meaning ignorant. - 11. What does the abbreviation 'e.g.' stand for?
- A. Exempli gratia (answer)
- B. Ergo generalis
- C. Et gratia
- D. Exemplum generale
It means 'for the sake of example'; i.e. is id est, 'that is'. - 12. What do you call words that sound the same but are spelled differently, like pair and pear?
- A. Homographs
- B. Homophones (answer)
- C. Synonyms
- D. Antonyms
Homographs are spelled the same but may sound different, like lead and lead.
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