quiz
/kwɪz/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.82 in modern English
22
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A competition in the answering of questions.
noun
A school examination of less importance, or of greater brevity, than others given in the same course.
verb
To hoax; to chaff or mock with pretended seriousness of discourse; to make sport of, as by obscure questions.
Archaic; Transitive verb
Example Sentences
- "I've always heard he was a quiz, says another, or a quoz, or some such word ; but I did not know he was such a book-worm."
- "I tell you I am going to the music shop. I trust to your honour. Lord Rawson, I know, will call me a fool for trusting to the honour of a quiz."
- "Where did you get that quiz of a hat? It makes you look like an old witch."
- "“I’m afraid you’re a sad quiz,” said Mrs. Bungay. ¶ “Quiz! never made a joke in my—hullo! who’s here? How d’ye do, Pendennis?"
- "We came second in the pub quiz."
- "Once all six friends are clear that the topic of Janet's story is a pub quiz, we launch into talk around this topic, combining factual information about quizzes we have participated in with fantasies about becoming a team ourselves."
Etymology
Attested since the 1780s, of unknown origin. * The Century Dictionary suggests it was originally applied to a popular toy, from a dialectal variant of whiz. * The Random House Dictionary suggests the original sense was "odd person" (circa 1780). * Others suggest the meaning "hoax" was original (1796), shifting to the meaning "interrogate" (1847) under the influence of question and inquisitive. * Some say without evidence it was invented by a late-18th-century Dublin theatre proprietor who bet he could add a new nonsense word to the English language; he had the word painted on walls all over the city, and the morning after, everyone was talking about it (The Pre-Victorian Drama in Dublin). * Others suggest it was originally quies (1847), Latin qui es? (who are you?), traditionally the first question in oral Latin exams. They suggest that it was first used as a noun from 1867, and the spelling quiz first recorded in 1886, but this is demonstrably incorrect. * A further derivation, assuming that the original sense is "good, ingenuous, harmless man, overly conventional, pedantic, rule-bound man, square; nerd; oddball, eccentric", is based on a column from 1785 which claims that the origin is a jocular translation of the Horace quotation vir bonus est quis as "the good man is a quiz" at Cambridge.