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Where the word quiz comes from: the wager story is probably false

What dictionaries and word historians say about where quiz comes from, why the 1791 Dublin wager story fails, and how the word reached school, radio and the pub.

The EdProcto editorial teamWritten and checked against the research it cites. Last checked . How the guides are made

Guides · Teaching from the results · · 13 min read

Where does the word quiz come from, and is the Dublin wager story true?

The word quiz has no known origin. It is first recorded in 1780 as slang for an odd person, came to mean a joke or a hoax and then to question, and named a test in American colleges by the 1860s. The story that a Dublin theatre manager coined it for a wager in 1791 was first printed in 1835 and is probably false.

The word quiz has a famous birth story and no known birth. The story says that in 1791 a Dublin theatre manager named Daly bet that he could put a new word into the language overnight, had "quiz" chalked on the city's walls, and won. The record says the word was in print in England eleven years earlier, meaning an odd-looking person.

This guide follows the word from that odd person to the classroom, the radio and the pub, and keeps what a named source says apart from what is only repeated. Every source was read on 10 October 2026. EdProcto publishes it and makes quizzes of three kinds, which the last section sets beside the history.

In short: the origin is unknown, the wager story is probably false, and the school sense is American and about 160 years old.

Where does the word quiz come from?

Nobody knows, and the dictionaries we could read say so. The American Heritage Dictionary (2022) closes its etymology with "Origin unknown." Dictionary.com (n.d.) writes "origin uncertain" and dates the first sense, an odd person, to 1775–85. Chambers (n.d.) gives the eighteenth century and stops. The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (Oxford University Press, n.d.) explains only the later sense: a verb of the mid nineteenth century, American at first, possibly from an older quiz meaning to look hard at someone, pulled towards the word inquisitive.

The first use can be traced. Tréguer (2017) and Wilton (2021) both give a comic poem of 1780, written as a letter from an Oxford student, whose Quiz is a fellow coach passenger in a sky-blue suit and pink breeches. In 1785 Francis Grose's slang dictionary defined the word, as Wilton quotes it: "a strange looking fellow, an odd dog".

Which dictionaries could we not read?

Seven: the Oxford English Dictionary, whose page came back empty, and Merriam-Webster, the Online Etymology Dictionary, Collins, Cambridge, Longman and the Britannica Dictionary, which refused our request or failed. Nothing here rests on them. The OED appears at second hand: Liberman (2007) lists the senses it records, and Wilton (2021) cites its entry as revised in June 2008.

What is the story of the Dublin theatre manager and the wager?

The story is that Richard Daly, manager of Dublin's Smock Alley theatre, won a bet by having a made-up word chalked across the city in a night. Its fullest telling is the memoir of a Dublin police magistrate, Porter (1880), first published in 1875 as Zimmer (2015) reports; we read the tenth edition.

Porter dates it to 21 August 1791. News has come that the Duchess of Leinster has had a son, and the Dublin Volunteers meet at the Eagle tavern in Eustace Street. Someone wants an English word for a French insult, and Daly says a word costs nothing to make. He bets twenty guineas that within forty-eight hours a new word, taken from no language, will be in every mouth in Dublin, and that within a week the public will give it a meaning. He hands cards and chalk to his call-boys and scene-shifters, and by Sunday morning one word is on doors and shutters across the city. After a few days, Porter writes, people decided what it was: "a hoax, a trick, a humbug, a joke".

It is a very good story. Quinion (1999) gives the proper response: "The story is best viewed through the bottom of a glass of something Irish."

How do the tellings differ?

In almost every detail that could be checked.

Telling Who bet Time allowed Who chalked Year
Leeds Times, 17 January 1835, quoted by Zimmer (2015) Richard Daly Until a set hour next day The theatre's servants and extras None
Smart's dictionary, 1836, quoted by Wilton (2021) Daly 24 hours Not said None
Porter (1880) Richard Daly 48 hours, and a week for a meaning Call-boys and scene-shifters 21 August 1791
Quinion (1999) James Daly 24 hours Street urchins None
Liberman (2007) Daly 24 hours Not said 1791

Tréguer (2017) quotes the same newspaper text from the Manchester Times of 24 January 1835 and calls that its first appearance; Zimmer's Leeds copy is a week older. Of the tellings we read, Porter's is the first to carry a year, and children do the chalking only in Quinion's.

Why do word historians doubt the wager story?

For three reasons: the word is older than the wager, the story is far younger than the word, and the same story had already been told about another word.

The word is older than the wager

By 1791 quiz had been in print for eleven years. After the poem of 1780 came an essay of 1782 in which Vicesimus Knox said that bookish men at Oxford and Cambridge were called quizzes, and a trial of 1783 at which a court heard that Harrow boys had shouted the word at two strangers. Counsel explained it, in the newspaper report Tréguer (2017) quotes, as "the cant word of the school for the year".

Liberman (2007), working from the OED's earliest citation as it then stood, 1782, concluded: "Daly's writing on the wall comes too late". Tréguer adds that the word arose in southern England and first named an odd-looking person, not an act of questioning. Wilton (2021) is the most generous: Daly bought the Smock Alley theatre in 1779–80, so the calendar does not rule a wager out, but no early use has anything to do with Ireland.

The story is far younger than the word

The story reached print in 1835, fifty-five years after the word's first known use and forty-four after the night Porter describes. Porter, born in 1801 by Project Gutenberg's record, had the story from his father's comrades in the Volunteers, and adds that every party to the wager had since died.

His date sits badly with his tale. His text ties the evening to 21 August 1791, which by our own count of the calendar was a Sunday; yet he says it was a Saturday evening, after the play. It is the kind of slip a story gathers when it is written down eighty-four years late.

The same story was told first about another word

Zimmer (2015) found the wager attached to quoz, a slang cousin of quiz, in London. The World of 15 August 1789 reported: "This queer word originated, we understand, in a bet." Two gentlemen had bet a dinner on making an absurd expression the talk of the town, and the winner began by chalking QUOZ on doors. Zimmer's reading is that the craze for quoz died and the folklore of the bet moved to the word that lasted. Liberman notes that two more people have been named as winners of the same wager.

None of this shows that nobody ever chalked a word on a Dublin wall, and Liberman allows that something of the kind may have happened. It shows that such a night, if there was one, did not make the word.

What are the rival explanations, and how much support does each have?

None is proven, and no dictionary we read commits to one. They are not equally supported.

  1. School and university slang. The best documented, as an account of where the word first lived: Oxford in 1780, both universities in 1782, Harrow in 1783, a Cambridge pamphlet for freshmen in 1785 (Wilton, 2021), Eton in 1787. It says who used the word, not how it was formed.
  2. The Latin quis. A pamphlet of 1783 and a Philadelphia newspaper of 1785, both quoted by Tréguer (2017), tie quiz to a line of Horace that asks who a good man is and ends on quis, "who". Tréguer thinks the derivation probable. On our reading its weakness is that the Harrow trial of 1783 heard a different explanation, two words meaning odd faces run together: people were already guessing.
  3. A clipping of inquisitive. Liberman calls this an old conjecture with Skeat's lukewarm backing, and cites a slang dictionary of 1864 in which an Oxford quiz was a prying person. But the earliest quizzes were odd, not nosy. The idea is better supported as the pull that later bent the word towards questions: three of the four dictionaries above name inquisitive for that.
  4. A toy, and the word whiz. The Century Dictionary, as Liberman reports it, took quiz to be first a toy on a string and a variant of whiz. Wilton's earliest citation for the toy is 1792, twelve years after the odd person, which on our reading does not help that order.

How did quiz come to mean a test in school, and where?

In the United States, around the middle of the nineteenth century, and the first school quiz was spoken, not written. The American Heritage Dictionary (2022) traces the path: the odd person gave a verb for making fun of someone, and then, in English dialects and probably in American English, the verb took on questioning. Wilton (2021) allows that the test sense may be a separate, later coinage.

Sense Earliest dated use we read of Who gives it
An odd person 1780, a comic poem Tréguer, Wilton
To make fun of someone 1787, an Eton magazine Tréguer, Wilton
A toy on a string 1792 Wilton
Mockery; to watch closely 1795 Tréguer, Wilton
To question a class June 1866, Harper's Wilton
A test 26 December 1867, a letter of William James Wilton
A contest on the radio 1923, the first programme named Woloson (n.d.)
An exam, a study quiz or a quiz night Today EdProcto

Who gives which date for the test?

The sources agree on the country and differ on the decade.

  • Wilton (2021) has the dated uses: in Harper's of June 1866 a professor at Iowa Medical College quizzes his class on fractures of the skull, and in 1867 William James writes of earning a little by giving quizzes in anatomy and physiology.
  • Dictionary.com (n.d.) dates the informal test to 1840–50, without a citation.
  • The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary and Quinion (1999) both say the middle of the nineteenth century.
  • Liberman (2007) says the 1890s. He wrote before the OED's revision of June 2008, which may explain the gap; that is our inference.

Both of Wilton's uses come from medical teaching, and so does the oldest definition we read. The Century Dictionary, whose text Wordnik (n.d.) reproduces, calls a quiz "An oral questioning of a student or class by a teacher", held to prepare for an examination, with the surgery quiz as its example. The school quiz began as coaching by question. British usage went another way: the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary puts the contest first and marks the classroom test as chiefly North American.

How did the quiz move from the classroom to radio, television and the pub?

Broadcasters took it up first, in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, and British pubs followed by the end of the 1950s.

Radio. Woloson (n.d.), in the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, begins with Time magazine, which ran current-events quizzes on American radio from 1923 to 1926. She calls Professor Quiz "the first genuine money quiz" and dates it to 1937 in Washington, D.C. Wikipedia's article on the programme (Wikipedia contributors, 2026) gives 9 May 1936; we could not settle the two at a first-hand source. Information Please, built to stump a panel of experts, followed in 1938.

Television. Guinness World Records (n.d.) names Spelling Bee as the first television game show: fifteen minutes on BBC television at 10 pm on 31 May 1938, with Freddie Grisewood asking contestants to spell words. Television's first game was a classroom exercise. In the United States, Woloson dates the first televised quiz shows to 1941; after the rigging scandals of the late 1950s, she writes, the shows of the 1960s renamed themselves game shows.

The pub. Garcia (2023), in the Guardian, reports that pub historians place the first pub quizzes in Merseyside and Lancashire in the late 1950s, where about 4,000 people joined leagues, though the Guinness Book of Records mentions a Yorkshire night of 1946. Boak & Bailey (2020) quote the Liverpool Echo of 30 October 1963, which has it all starting in a Bootle public house four years before, and they decline to name an inventor. Burns and Porter, in Garcia's account the first mass-market pub quiz company, was founded in 1976 and pitched the quiz as a way to bring trade in on quiet nights.

To run one yourself, see how to host a quiz night with a live scoreboard.

What is a quiz for today?

A quiz today does two jobs, and the word has carried both for about a century: it checks what someone knows, and it entertains. A quiz that counts for little turns out to teach as well as check, and the experiments are in our guide to retrieval practice. A quiz sat in front of someone is also a record of what a person can answer unaided; the history of proof in education tells how examinations came to that.

What is a quiz in EdProcto today?

In EdProcto a quiz is one of three kinds. The builder's selector, labelled "Kind of quiz", lists "Exam", "Study quiz" and "Quiz night", and describes them: "Exam: handed in once, marked at the end. Study quiz: each answer shown at once, misses retried. Quiz night: played live, with a scoreboard." That is the test of the 1860s, the coaching class of the Century Dictionary and the league night of Bootle.

A quiz takes any of 111 question shapes in twelve categories, 77 in the builder now and 34 marked as coming. The Free plan gives "10 quizzes a month" and "30 students a quiz", and on it "Procto AI writes 20 questions a month". The pricing page has the other plans.

Quick questions

Who invented the word quiz?

Nobody who can be named. The dictionaries we read call its origin unknown or uncertain, and the earliest known use is a comic poem of 1780.

Is the story about Richard Daly and the Dublin wager true?

Probably not, as the origin of the word. Quiz was in print in England by 1780, the story was first printed in 1835, and a chalked wager had been reported of the word quoz in London in 1789.

When did quiz first mean a test at school?

In the United States. Wilton (2021) gives a verb from 1866 and a noun from 1867; Dictionary.com dates the sense to 1840–50.

Can a quiz in EdProcto be a test, a study aid or a game?

Yes: an exam, a study quiz or a quiz night, chosen in the builder. The Free plan lists "The core templates and every kit", so you can start from a kit.

References

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