What is a good random trivia question?

One with a short answer anyone can guess and a surprise behind it. “Which number had no symbol in Roman numerals?” works: everyone has a go, and the answer, zero, stops the room.

Can you give me a random trivia question?

Which country is named after the line that runs through it? Ecuador, Spanish for equator. For another, use the shuffle at the top: it won't repeat a question until you've seen all 200.

What are some random facts most people don't know?

The hippo's closest living relatives are whales and dolphins. Capers are pickled flower buds. Lightning can melt sand into glass tubes called fulgurites. Every answer on this page comes with a fact like these.

What are easy random trivia questions for adults?

Tap Easy in the shuffle to deal only those. Three to start: how many is a baker's dozen (13), how long is a fortnight (two weeks), and what is the largest rodent (the capybara)?

How many questions should a quick trivia round have?

Five for a meeting warm-up, about three to five minutes. For a full game, plan four to six rounds of ten in an hour plus a tiebreaker, as in our guide on how to host a trivia night.

Where can I find 1,000 random trivia questions?

Lists of 1,000 tend to pad with repeats and outdated facts, so we keep 200, each checked against a source. For more, try our general knowledge questions, hard trivia questions, funny trivia questions and bar trivia questions: a different set on each, with no repeats.

Random trivia questions: 200 with answers

Shuffle for a random question, guess, then see the answer and the story behind it. All 200 are listed below too.

KraftyLab TeamUpdated Oct 202616 min read

Everyday things · Hard1 of 200

Which Swedish engineer at Volvo invented the three-point seatbelt, first fitted to its cars in 1959?

Say your answer out loud, then check it.

These 200 random trivia questions cover everyday things, places, animals, space, food and history, each with a short answer and a random trivia fact behind it. They come in no order, on purpose, and each is marked easy, medium or hard.

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200 random trivia questions and answers

1. Which Swedish engineer at Volvo invented the three-point seatbelt, first fitted to its cars in 1959?Hard
Show the answer
Nils Bohlin. Before Volvo, he worked on aircraft ejection seats at Saab.
2. Which breed of cat is known for having no tail?Medium
Show the answer
The Manx. It comes from the Isle of Man, between Britain and Ireland.
3. What was the first crop NASA astronauts grew and ate on the International Space Station, in 2015?Medium
Show the answer
Red romaine lettuce. They grew it under LED lights in a small plant chamber called Veggie.
4. Which country is nicknamed the land of fire and ice?Easy
Show the answer
Iceland. Active volcanoes sit right beside its glaciers.
5. Potassium's chemical symbol is K. Which name for it does the K come from?Hard
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Kalium. Kalium is still the element's name in German.
6. In Denmark, Danish pastries are called wienerbrød. Which city does the name point to?Hard
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Vienna. The story goes that Austrian bakers hired in Denmark around 1850 brought Vienna's layered dough with them.
7. The spirals of seeds in a sunflower head follow which famous number sequence?Medium
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The Fibonacci sequence. Each number is the sum of the two before it: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13.
8. The saxophone is named after its Belgian inventor. What was his name?Easy
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Adolphe Sax. He patented it in 1846.
9. Cork comes from the bark of which tree?Easy
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The cork oak. Harvesters strip the bark every nine to twelve years, and the tree grows it back.
10. Which English writer coined the word serendipity, in 1754?Hard
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Horace Walpole. He took it from an old tale, The Three Princes of Serendip.
11. Rome's Pantheon has a dome that has stood for about 1,900 years without any reinforcement. What is it made of?Medium
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Concrete. It's still the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome.
12. What does the Japanese word karaoke mean?Medium
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Empty orchestra. Kara means empty, and oke is short for ōkesutora, orchestra.
13. What is the scientific name for the southern lights?Medium
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Aurora australis. The northern lights are the aurora borealis.
14. The word kayak comes from the language of which Arctic people?Easy
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The Inuit. The original qajaq was a hunting boat made of skin stretched over a frame.
15. Which African animal is striped black and white from head to tail, in a pattern unique to each one?Easy
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The zebra. No two zebras have exactly the same stripes.
16. Which city was called New Amsterdam until 1664?Easy
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New York. The English renamed it after the Duke of York.
17. What's one old name for a group of ravens?Hard
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An unkindness. Ravens can copy human speech, much as parrots do.
18. Bananas were first farmed on which island, thousands of years ago?Hard
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New Guinea. Wild bananas are full of hard seeds; farmers picked out the seedless kinds.
19. Which bird is the only one with nostrils at the very tip of its beak?Medium
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The kiwi. It sniffs out worms and insects in the soil at night.
20. Which fruit goes into classic British marmalade?Easy
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Seville oranges. The word comes from marmelada, Portuguese for quince paste.
21. Which animal is the logo of the WWF, the conservation group?Easy
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The giant panda. It was inspired by Chi Chi, a panda at London Zoo, when the group started in 1961.
22. What's the name of the wavy ~ mark?Easy
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A tilde. In Spanish, it turns n into ñ, as in año.
23. Which kitchen machine did Josephine Cochrane patent in 1886?Medium
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The dishwasher. She wanted a machine that would wash her good china without chipping it.
24. Venus flytraps are native to only one small region of the world. Where?Hard
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The Carolinas, in the US. Their native range is a patch of wetlands around Wilmington, North Carolina.
25. Which city opened the world's first underground railway, in 1863?Easy
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London. The first line ran steam trains between Paddington and Farringdon.
26. Potatoes were first farmed in which mountain range?Medium
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The Andes. People in what's now Peru and Bolivia grew them thousands of years ago.
27. Measured against the stars, how long does Earth take to spin once?Hard
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About 23 hours and 56 minutes. The 24-hour day is a little longer because Earth also moves along its orbit.
28. What did the first text message, sent in 1992, say?Medium
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Merry Christmas. Engineer Neil Papworth sent it from a computer to a mobile phone in the UK.
29. Which plant has the largest single flower in the world?Hard
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Rafflesia arnoldii. It can be about a meter across and smells like rotting meat, to draw in flies.
30. The word jumbo, meaning extra large, caught on thanks to a famous what?Medium
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An elephant. Jumbo lived at London Zoo until P.T. Barnum bought him for his circus in 1882.
31. The pineapple got its English name because it looked like what?Medium
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A pine cone. In English, pineapple first meant a pine cone.
32. The word shampoo comes from Hindi. What did the original word mean?Medium
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To press or massage. It came to English in the 1700s as a word for a head massage.
33. The Rubik's Cube was invented in which country?Medium
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Hungary. Ernő Rubik, a design teacher in Budapest, built the first one in 1974, and it took him about a month to solve it.
34. Which planet has the fastest winds in the solar system?Hard
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Neptune. Its winds can top 2,000 km/h.
35. Which is the only month that can pass without a full moon?Medium
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February. It's shorter than the 29.5 days between one full moon and the next.
36. Which two countries share the Caribbean island of Hispaniola?Medium
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Haiti and the Dominican Republic. It's the second-largest island in the Caribbean, after Cuba.
37. Italian gnocchi are usually made mostly from which vegetable?Easy
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Potato. The little dumplings are often pressed with a fork to give them ridges that hold the sauce.
38. How old was Louis Braille when he came up with his raised-dot reading system?Medium
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15. He was a student at a school for blind children in Paris at the time.
39. What color is an airplane's flight recorder, the so-called black box?Medium
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Bright orange. The color makes it easier to find.
40. The Great Fire of London in 1666 started in what kind of shop?Medium
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A bakery. It was Thomas Farriner's bakery on Pudding Lane.
41. The tiny pocket inside the front pocket of jeans was first made to hold what?Easy
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A pocket watch. Levi's still calls it the watch pocket.
42. Which moon of Jupiter is the most volcanically active place in the solar system?Hard
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Io. It has hundreds of active volcanoes, heated by the tug of Jupiter's gravity.
43. Which animal has the largest eyes ever measured?Hard
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The colossal squid. Each eye is about the size of a dinner plate, around 27 cm across.
44. Almost every wild lemur on Earth lives on which island nation?Easy
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Madagascar. It broke away from Africa around 160 million years ago.
45. What is the largest object in the asteroid belt?Medium
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Ceres. It was called a planet when it was found in 1801. Today it's a dwarf planet.
46. How many letters are in the Greek alphabet?Medium
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24. Its last letter, omega, literally means “big O.”
47. Which US state's flag isn't a rectangle?Medium
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Ohio. It's a swallowtail shape called a burgee.
48. What is a group of porcupines called?Medium
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A prickle. A single North American porcupine can carry around 30,000 quills.
49. How long is a fortnight?Easy
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Two weeks. The word is a squeeze of the Old English for “fourteen nights.”
50. What makes a popcorn kernel pop?Easy
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Water inside it turning to steam. The steam builds up pressure until the hard hull bursts.
51. Who was the first woman in space?Medium
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Valentina Tereshkova. She circled Earth 48 times in June 1963.
52. How many legs does a lobster have?Medium
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10. Lobsters are decapods, or ten-footed, and the big claws are the front pair.
53. Which common English word is the only one that ends in the letters mt?Hard
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Dreamt. The only other words that end in mt are built on it, like undreamt and daydreamt.
54. Which number had no symbol in Roman numerals?Medium
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Zero. When they needed it, medieval writers used the word nulla, meaning none.
55. Which canal links the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea?Easy
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The Suez Canal. It opened in 1869, so ships between Europe and Asia no longer had to sail around Africa.
56. Fireflies aren't flies. What kind of insect are they?Medium
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Beetles. Their glow comes from a chemical reaction that gives off almost no heat.
57. What did Wilhelm Röntgen discover in 1895?Easy
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X-rays. He called them X because he didn't know what they were.
58. Which shark may live about 400 years, longer than any other known vertebrate?Hard
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The Greenland shark. Scientists estimated one female at between 272 and 512 years old.
59. What is the world's northernmost capital of an independent country?Medium
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Reykjavík. It sits just south of the Arctic Circle, at about 64 degrees north.
60. Apollo astronauts left mirrors on the Moon. What are they used for?Medium
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Measuring the Moon's distance with lasers. Observatories still bounce laser pulses off them today.
61. Venezuela's name means little what?Medium
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Little Venice. In the best-known story, explorers saw houses on stilts over Lake Maracaibo that reminded them of Venice.
62. What is the brightest star in the night sky?Medium
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Sirius. It's often called the Dog Star.
63. Monarch butterflies from eastern North America spend the winter in the mountains of which country?Medium
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Mexico. Some fly more than 4,000 km (2,500 miles) to get there.
64. On a ship, is port the left side or the right side?Easy
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The left, facing forward. Starboard comes from steering board, because old ships were steered from the right.
65. What is a shooting star, really?Easy
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A meteor. Most are bits of space dust between the size of a grain of sand and a pea, burning up in the air.
66. What makes the holes in Swiss cheeses like Emmental?Medium
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Gas bubbles from bacteria. Swiss researchers found that tiny bits of hay in the milk help the bubbles get started.
67. What are the grooved ridges around the edge of some coins called?Hard
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Reeding. They made it easy to spot a gold or silver coin that had been shaved down for its metal.
68. What do the letters i.e. stand for?Medium
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Id est. It's Latin for “that is.” Its cousin e.g. means “for example.”
69. What were the first letters ever sent over ARPANET, the internet's ancestor, in 1969?Hard
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LO. The system crashed while the sender was typing LOGIN.
70. Apart from the platypus, which is the only other egg-laying mammal alive today?Medium
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The echidna. Together they make up the monotremes, and a baby echidna is called a puggle.
71. What number is a googol?Medium
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1 followed by 100 zeros. Google's name is a play on it.
72. How many eyes does a honeybee have?Hard
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Five. Two big compound eyes on the sides, and three small ones on top of the head.
73. The words chocolate, tomato and avocado all come from which language?Hard
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Nahuatl. It was the language of the Aztecs, and more than a million people in Mexico still speak it.
74. The temple complex of Angkor Wat is in which country?Easy
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Cambodia. It appears on Cambodia's national flag.
75. Which South American country is over 4,000 km long but, on average, less than 200 km wide?Medium
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Chile. It runs from the driest deserts in the north to glaciers in the far south.
76. Which Indian city was called Bombay until 1995?Easy
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Mumbai. Bollywood's name blends Bombay and Hollywood.
77. Which two spices come from the same fruit?Hard
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Nutmeg and mace. Nutmeg is the seed, and mace is the lacy red covering around it.
78. Which golden gemstone is actually fossilized tree resin?Easy
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Amber. Insects trapped in it millions of years ago can be preserved in fine detail.
79. What chemical makes chili peppers taste hot?Medium
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Capsaicin. Birds don't feel its burn, so they eat the peppers and spread the seeds.
80. What is the largest lake in the world by area?Medium
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The Caspian Sea. It's called a sea, but it's landlocked, with five countries around its shores.
81. Who is traditionally credited with inventing paper in China, around AD 105?Hard
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Cai Lun. He was an official at the court of the Han dynasty.
82. The Big Dipper is part of which constellation?Medium
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Ursa Major. Ursa Major is Latin for greater bear.
83. The word pixel is short for what?Medium
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Picture element. Every photo on your screen is a grid of millions of them.
84. Which South American empire, ruled from Cusco, kept records with knotted strings called quipu?Medium
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The Inca. The type of each knot and where it sat on the cord recorded numbers.
85. About how many Earth days does a year on Mars last?Hard
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687. That's nearly two Earth years.
86. Which European capital is spread across 14 islands?Hard
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Stockholm. It sits where Lake Mälaren flows into the Baltic Sea.
87. What was Mario called in his first game, Donkey Kong?Medium
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Jumpman. He was a carpenter back then, not a plumber.
88. Sushi rice is seasoned with which kind of vinegar?Easy
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Rice vinegar. An early ancestor was narezushi, fish packed in fermenting rice to keep it from spoiling.
89. Which Australian bird is famous for copying sounds like chainsaws and camera shutters?Medium
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The lyrebird. Males weave the borrowed sounds into their courtship songs.
90. Poutine, fries with cheese curds and gravy, comes from which Canadian province?Easy
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Quebec. It took off in rural Quebec in the 1950s.
91. What was Thailand called until 1939?Medium
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Siam. The country briefly went back to the name Siam from 1945 to 1949.
92. The word zipper started as a brand name for what kind of footwear?Hard
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Rubber boots. B.F. Goodrich sold zip-up galoshes as Zippers in the 1920s, and the name moved to the fastener.
93. A squid has eight arms. How many longer tentacles does it have on top of those?Medium
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Two. It shoots the tentacles out to grab prey, then the arms pull it in.
94. Which board game did ancient Egyptians play, with boards found in Tutankhamun's tomb?Hard
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Senet. It's one of the oldest known board games, played more than 4,500 years ago.
95. What's the punctuation mark that combines a question mark and an exclamation point called?Hard
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An interrobang. Advertising executive Martin Speckter proposed it in 1962.
96. Roughly how long does light from the Moon take to reach Earth?Medium
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About 1.3 seconds. The Moon makes no light of its own. Moonlight is sunlight bouncing off it.
97. The electric eel isn't an eel at all. What kind of fish is it?Hard
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A knifefish. It breathes air, so it has to come up to the surface to gulp it.
98. Which element was spotted in the Sun's light in 1868, years before anyone found it on Earth?Medium
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Helium. Its name comes from helios, the Greek word for the Sun.
99. What is the largest rodent in the world?Easy
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The capybara. It's a strong swimmer, with slightly webbed feet.
100. What does JPEG stand for?Hard
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Joint Photographic Experts Group. It's the name of the committee that wrote the image standard in 1992.

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101. Which unit measures a ship's speed?Easy
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Knots. Sailors once counted how many knots on a line ran out behind the ship in a set time.
102. In computing, what is half a byte called?Hard
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A nibble. A byte is eight bits, so a nibble is four.
103. Which animals are the hippo's closest living relatives?Hard
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Whales and dolphins. The two groups shared a common ancestor more than 50 million years ago.
104. About how long does the International Space Station take to circle Earth once?Medium
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About 90 minutes. So the crew sees around 16 sunrises a day.
105. Which word was made by blending smoke and fog?Easy
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Smog. It was already in use in Britain in the early 1900s.
106. In which year was the Mona Lisa stolen from the Louvre?Hard
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1911. It turned up in Florence two years later and went back to Paris.
107. Visitors from which European country brought the batter-frying that became Japan's tempura?Hard
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Portugal. They arrived in Japan in the 1500s.
108. Which is the largest country in the world to use a single time zone?Medium
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China. It spans about five geographic time zones but runs on Beijing time.
109. Which Scottish inventor gave the first public demonstration of true television pictures, in 1926?Medium
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John Logie Baird. He showed moving pictures to scientists in a room in London's Soho.
110. Which pine includes some of the oldest living trees on Earth, in California's White Mountains?Hard
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The Great Basin bristlecone pine. One known as Methuselah is more than 4,600 years old.
111. What is the name of the giant canyon system on Mars?Hard
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Valles Marineris. It's about 4,000 km long, roughly the width of the United States.
112. Tulips are a symbol of the Netherlands. Where did they first grow wild?Medium
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Central Asia. They reached Dutch gardens in the late 1500s, by way of the Ottoman Empire.
113. Which sea creature's punch is so fast it can crack aquarium glass?Medium
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The mantis shrimp. Its club-like arms strike faster than the blink of an eye.
114. In AD 132, the Chinese scholar Zhang Heng built an early instrument to detect what?Hard
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Earthquakes. When the ground shook, a ball dropped from a dragon's mouth into a toad's, meant to show where the quake came from.
115. What were Kleenex tissues first sold for, in 1924?Medium
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Removing cold cream. By the 1930s the ads sold them as throwaway handkerchiefs: “Don't Carry a Cold in Your Pocket.”
116. Silk comes from the cocoons of which creature?Easy
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The silkworm. It's a moth caterpillar, and one cocoon can be spun from a single thread hundreds of meters long.
117. Which Central American country's name means rich coast in Spanish?Easy
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Costa Rica. It has coasts on both the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
118. OK began as a joke abbreviation in 1830s Boston. What misspelled phrase did it stand for?Medium
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Oll korrect. A Boston newspaper printed it in 1839, as a playful spelling of “all correct.”
119. Which country has a cedar tree on its flag?Medium
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Lebanon. Cedars of Lebanon were prized as timber in the ancient world.
120. Which volcanic rock is so full of gas bubbles that it can float on water?Medium
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Pumice. Rafts of floating pumice from undersea eruptions can drift for thousands of kilometers.
121. As of 2026, how many people have walked on the Moon?Medium
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12. All of them walked there between 1969 and 1972.
122. When lightning hits sand, it can melt it into hollow glass tubes. What are they called?Hard
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Fulgurites. The name comes from fulgur, the Latin word for lightning.
123. What was the name of the first space station, launched in 1971?Hard
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Salyut 1. The Soviet Union put it up 27 years before the first piece of the International Space Station.
124. Which element is named after the Moon?Hard
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Selenium. Selene was the Greek name for the Moon. Tellurium, named after Earth, sits just below it on the periodic table.
125. Pluto orbits in which icy region beyond Neptune?Medium
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The Kuiper Belt. It's home to countless icy bodies left over from the birth of the solar system.
126. What did the Romans call London?Easy
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Londinium. They founded it on the River Thames around AD 47.
127. Which country is named after the line that runs through it?Easy
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Ecuador. Ecuador is Spanish for equator.
128. What are the giant stone statues on Easter Island called?Medium
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Moai. The island's own name is Rapa Nui.
129. What is inside an Etch A Sketch that makes the lines?Hard
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Aluminum powder. The knobs move a stylus that scrapes the powder off the back of the glass.
130. Which month takes its name from Julius Caesar?Easy
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July. August is named after his heir, Augustus.
131. What was the first animal to orbit Earth?Easy
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Laika, a dog. She flew on the Soviet Sputnik 2 in November 1957.
132. Which city was called Edo until 1868?Medium
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Tokyo. Its new name means eastern capital.
133. What was Pac-Man called when it first came out in Japan?Medium
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Puck Man. The name comes from paku-paku, the Japanese sound of a mouth snapping open and shut.
134. What do people in the UK call the leafy herb that Americans call cilantro?Easy
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Coriander. Both names refer to the same plant. In the US, coriander usually means its dried seeds.
135. The name Crayola comes from the French word craie and the word oleaginous. What do they mean?Medium
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Chalk and oily. Alice Binney, a teacher and the wife of a co-founder, came up with the name.
136. Which ancient people built the step pyramid of Chichén Itzá in Mexico?Easy
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The Maya. At the spring and fall equinoxes, the shadows on its steps look like a snake crawling down.
137. Which plant's clingy burrs gave Swiss engineer George de Mestral the idea for Velcro?Hard
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Burdock. He noticed the burrs stuck to his dog's fur after a walk in 1941.
138. What is a young eel called once it reaches fresh water?Hard
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An elver. European eels start life in the Sargasso Sea and drift thousands of kilometers to reach Europe.
139. Gouda cheese is named after a city in which country?Easy
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The Netherlands. Farmers traded it in the city's market square, where a cheese market still runs.
140. A murmuration is a huge, swirling flock of which bird?Medium
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Starlings. Each bird tracks about seven of its neighbors, which is how thousands turn as one.
141. Which nut gives Nutella its flavor?Easy
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Hazelnut. It was created in Italy by the Ferrero company.
142. What does the name Beijing mean?Medium
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Northern capital. It has been China's capital, on and off, since the 1200s.
143. Every Hass avocado tree traces back to one tree planted in the 1920s by whom?Medium
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Rudolph Hass, a mail carrier. He grew it in his small grove in La Habra Heights, California, and patented it in 1935.
144. Which bird has the widest wingspan of any living bird?Medium
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The wandering albatross. Its wings can stretch up to about 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) from tip to tip.
145. A classic snowflake crystal has how many arms?Easy
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Six. Water molecules lock into a six-sided pattern as they freeze.
146. The Spanish dish paella is named after what?Medium
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The pan it's cooked in. Paella means frying pan in Valencian, the language of the dish's home region.
147. Which big cat lives in family groups called prides?Easy
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The lion. A pride is built around related females and their cubs.
148. What is the largest moon in the solar system?Medium
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Ganymede. This moon of Jupiter is bigger than the planet Mercury.
149. What do you call an eating utensil that's half spoon, half fork?Easy
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A spork. The word has been in English dictionaries for more than a century.
150. The name September comes from the Latin word for which number?Medium
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Seven. The early Roman calendar started its year in March.
151. Which author made up the word chortle?Medium
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Lewis Carroll. It's a blend of chuckle and snort, first used in Through the Looking-Glass.
152. The Granny Smith apple was first grown in which country?Medium
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Australia. Maria Ann Smith found the seedling near Sydney in 1868.
153. Which famous comet comes back about every 76 years?Easy
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Halley's Comet. It's next due back in 2061.
154. The radio distress call Mayday comes from which language?Medium
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French. It echoes m'aider, from venez m'aider, “come help me.”
155. Quinoa is cooked like a grain, but it's actually what?Medium
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A seed. The plant is a relative of spinach and beets.
156. What's the name of the little three-legged plastic table in the middle of a pizza box?Hard
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A pizza saver. Carmela Vitale of New York patented it in 1985 to keep the lid off the cheese.
157. Which desert stretches across southern Mongolia and northern China?Medium
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The Gobi. It's a cold desert, where winter temperatures can drop to about -40°C.
158. Which bird, named after its two-note call, lays its eggs in other birds' nests?Medium
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The common cuckoo. The cuckoo chick often pushes the host's own eggs out of the nest.
159. How many colors did Isaac Newton name in the rainbow?Medium
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Seven. He added orange and indigo so the count matched the seven notes of a musical scale.
160. Which ancient seafaring people founded Carthage, in today's Tunisia?Hard
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The Phoenicians. Settlers from the city of Tyre, in today's Lebanon, founded it.
161. Argentina's name comes from the Latin word for which metal?Medium
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Silver. Early Spanish explorers hoped the region was rich in silver.
162. In a cave, do stalactites hang from the ceiling or rise from the floor?Easy
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They hang from the ceiling. Stalagmites grow up from the floor. Stalactites hold on “tight” to the ceiling.
163. Which color of star is the hottest?Medium
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Blue. Red stars are the coolest, and the Sun sits in between.
164. Which Asian country has a dragon on its national flag?Medium
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Bhutan. Its name in the local language, Druk Yul, means land of the thunder dragon.
165. What is the tiny hole near the bottom of an airplane window for?Medium
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Balancing air pressure between the panes. It's called a breather hole, and it also stops the window fogging up.
166. What do the British call a zucchini?Medium
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A courgette. Both names mean little squash, one in French and one in Italian.
167. Which board game, patented by Lizzie Magie in 1904, was the forerunner of Monopoly?Hard
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The Landlord's Game. Parker Brothers released Monopoly about 30 years later, in 1935.
168. Which Mediterranean island country has a map of itself on its flag?Medium
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Cyprus. The map is copper-colored, for the metal the island was known for in ancient times.
169. What was the name of the first spacecraft to land on a comet, in 2014?Hard
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Philae. It rode there aboard the European Space Agency's Rosetta probe.
170. What do you call a spinning column of air and spray over a lake or the sea?Easy
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A waterspout. Most are weak fair-weather waterspouts, not tornadoes that wandered over water.
171. Which city was Japan's capital for more than a thousand years before Tokyo?Medium
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Kyoto. Emperors lived there from 794 until 1869.
172. Which African country has a grey crowned crane on its flag?Hard
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Uganda. The crane is Uganda's national bird.
173. The word wiki comes from Hawaiian. What does it mean?Medium
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Quick. Programmer Ward Cunningham named the first wiki in 1995 after the Wiki Wiki shuttle bus at Honolulu's airport.
174. What sits at the center of our Milky Way galaxy?Medium
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A supermassive black hole. Called Sagittarius A*, it has about 4 million times the Sun's mass.
175. What does the French phrase déjà vu mean, word for word?Easy
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Already seen. It's that feeling you've lived a moment before.
176. Capers, the little salty green balls, are actually what?Medium
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Pickled flower buds. They're the unopened buds of a shrub that grows around the Mediterranean.
177. Which of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World was a lighthouse?Medium
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The Lighthouse of Alexandria. It guided ships into Egypt's great harbor for well over a thousand years.
178. Which space telescope launched on December 25, 2021?Medium
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The James Webb Space Telescope. It works about 1.5 million km from Earth.
179. What does GPS stand for?Easy
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Global Positioning System. Your phone works out where it is by timing signals from several satellites at once.
180. Before Wham-O renamed it the Frisbee in the late 1950s, what was its plastic flying disc called?Medium
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The Pluto Platter. The new name came from the Frisbie Pie Company, whose empty pie tins students liked to throw.
181. The leotard is named after a French performer of the 1800s. What was his act?Medium
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The flying trapeze. Jules Léotard first performed his flying trapeze act in 1859, in a snug one-piece he could move freely in.
182. Linen is woven from the fibers of which plant?Medium
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Flax. People in ancient Egypt were wearing linen thousands of years ago.
183. What gives sourdough bread its tang?Medium
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Acid made by bacteria in the starter. Wild yeast in the starter makes the bread rise.
184. Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands. Which city is home to its government?Medium
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The Hague. The International Court of Justice sits there too.
185. What did the ancient Egyptians write on, made from a tall marsh plant?Easy
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Papyrus. The word paper comes from it.
186. The word safari comes from Swahili. What does it mean?Medium
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Journey. Swahili took it from the Arabic word for travel.
187. What did Mary Anderson patent in 1903, after a snowy streetcar ride in New York?Medium
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Windshield wipers. The driver kept opening the window to clear the glass, so she sketched a blade worked by a lever from inside the car.
188. Which Asian country is an island city-state at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula?Easy
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Singapore. Its name comes from Singapura, lion city.
189. What kind of animal was Dolly, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell?Easy
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A sheep. She was born in Scotland in 1996.
190. What did architect Alfred Butts first call the word game that became Scrabble?Hard
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Lexiko. It was renamed Criss-Crosswords next, and Scrabble in 1948.
191. Which mostly underwater continent lies around New Zealand?Hard
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Zealandia. About 94 percent of it sits below the Pacific Ocean.
192. Which symbol did engineer Ray Tomlinson pick for email addresses in 1971?Medium
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The @ sign. He chose it because it never appeared in usernames, and user@host reads as user “at” host.
193. Nearly all bananas shipped between countries belong to which variety?Medium
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Cavendish. It's named after William Cavendish, a British duke whose gardener grew it in the 1830s.
194. Which gas gives most auroras their green glow?Hard
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Oxygen. Nitrogen adds the blues and purples.
195. How many is a baker's dozen?Easy
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13. Bakers have handed over 13 for 12 for centuries, though nobody is sure why the custom started.
196. Does the spin of the Earth decide which way a sink drains?Medium
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No. A sink is far too small. Its shape and how the water went in matter far more.
197. What does the Morse code distress signal SOS stand for?Medium
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Nothing. It was picked because three dots, three dashes and three dots is easy to send and hard to mistake.
198. Which spacecraft became the first to reach interstellar space, in 2012?Medium
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Voyager 1. It launched in 1977 and carries a golden record of sounds and music from Earth.
199. Switzerland names no official capital in its constitution. Which city is its seat of government?Hard
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Bern. The Swiss call it the federal city.
200. What is a baby owl called?Easy
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An owlet. Many owlets leave the nest before they can fly, and climb around nearby branches.

How to use random trivia at work

Stand-up warm-up. One question before the updates. Whoever answers first picks the next speaker.
While people join a call. Share your screen and run a 5-question round until everyone's in.
A daily trivia question in the team chat. Post one in the morning and the answer after lunch, in a thread.
A tiebreaker or a break. Pick a hard one to settle a tie, or two easy ones to wake a long workshop back up.

For a daily conversation question instead of trivia, use our question of the day or the random question generator.

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