Quiz

The word "quiz" appeared in English in the late eighteenth century, and nobody is entirely sure where it came from. The most celebrated explanation — repeated in dictionaries, pub trivia nights and word-origin books — is the story of Richard Daly, the manager of a Dublin theatre in the 1780s. According to the tale, Daly made a bet that he could introduce a brand-new, meaningless word into the English language within forty-eight hours.

Daly is said to have hired a gang of street urchins to chalk the four letters Q-U-I-Z on walls, doors and shopfronts all over Dublin overnight. By morning the mysterious word was on everyone's lips. People asked each other what it meant, and the word — at first signifying a puzzle or a joke — lodged itself in the city's vocabulary. Daly, so the story goes, won his bet and a nonsense word became a permanent part of the English language.

The trouble is that no contemporary evidence supports the Daly story, and many etymologists regard it as a charming folk etymology — a good tale that explains a gap nobody can otherwise fill. What the written record does show is that "quiz" first appeared in the 1780s meaning "an odd or eccentric person" — someone who was a curiosity. By the early nineteenth century it had shifted to mean "to make fun of" or "to look at quizzically," and by the mid-1800s it had settled into its modern sense: to test someone's knowledge with a set of questions.

Whether Richard Daly's bet really happened or not, the word's journey from a puzzle scrawled on Dublin walls (or from a forgotten slang term for an oddity) to the universal word for a short test of knowledge is itself a kind of quiz — a question about language that still has no certain answer.