Pop Quiz: Where Did The Word Quiz Come From?

The story of the origin of the word “quiz” is quite an interesting one. A Dublin theatre proprietor by the name of Richard Daly dreamt up a performance piece that would work to understand slang and the common language. The performance was to make a nonsense word known throughout the city within 48 hours. The performance suggested that even with a nonsensical word, the public would supply a meaning for it. After a performance one evening, he gave his staff cards with the word ‘quiz’ written on them, and told them to write the word vigorously on walls around the city. The next day the strange word was the talk of the town, and within a short time it had become part of the language.

That story had its most detailed account in F. T. Porter’s ‘Gleanings and Reminiscences’, 1875, and gives the event a date of 1791. The word, however, was already in use by then, meaning ‘an odd or eccentric person’, and had been used in this sense by Fanny Burney in her diary entry for 24 June 1782. ‘Quiz’ was also used as a name for a kind of toy, something like a yo-yo, which was popular around 1790. The word is nevertheless hard to account for, and so is its later meaning of ‘to question or interrogate’. This emerged in the mid-19th century and gave rise to the most common use of the term today, for a type of entertainment based on a test of a person’s knowledge.

Text: sheacote
Photo: thepowerremains