“Quiz,” an 1839 painting by Edwin Landseer. In a demonstration of differences in size, Quiz, a Maltese dog, sits on a table, its paw on the snout of a St. Bernard. Next to him are an artist’s drawing tools. A mouse is in the foreground. Quiz belonged to Queen Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent.
23 July 2021 (slightly revised 26 July 2021)
(The 26 July revision unambiguously marks the older senses of quiz as archaic, no longer in common use. It also introduces the suggestion that the sense of a test or exam is a separate, more recent coinage unrelated to the older uses and the sense meaning a bandalore.)
The origin of quiz is unknown. It arises in the late eighteenth century, and it went through a number of semantic changes before it arrived at the common meanings today of a noun meaning a test of knowledge or a verb meaning to ask questions about a topic. Given its similarity to older words like inquisitive, it may have a root in Latin, but its early uses are very much in slang and have quite different meanings, so that assumption is by no means certain.
The earliest known appearance of quiz is in a 1780 poem by Roger Wittol, An Incredible Bore. Here it means an odd or eccentric person sense that is now archaic:
T’other morning I threw off my chains with my gown,
Took a place in the Dilly and dangled to town;
(You must know ’twas a scheme, as we knowing ones say,
’Tis a BORE to be there in a d-----’d modest way)
When I found myself plac’d ’twixt a chandler’s fat wife,
And a fellow who (damme) knew nothing of life.
Me thinks ’tis a pleasantish day, says the dame,
To which I assented, the Quiz did the same:
She wish’d that these outlandish troubles would clear,
For this ’Merikin war made candles so dear.---
Our Quiz, with a head plaister’d o’er like twelfth-cake,
And a large sausage curl just above a black neck,
Had a DITTO sky-blue on, except that his breeches
Were pink, and his boot-tops were work’d with white stitches;
Notwithstanding all this I presum’d to suppose
He was going to town, to the Hummums, or Lowe’s,
Or somewhere in the Garden, where all the world goes.
Quiz quickly gave birth to the adjectives quizzical and quizzy; the latter is also now archaic. Both adjectives meant odd or peculiar and were in place by 1785.
And it appears in a 1785 pamphlet for first-year students at Cambridge University, one of the many early uses of the word coming from a school setting. The pamphlet, titled Ten Minutes Advice to Freshmen, has this to say about being teased for being a quiz, testament that schoolyard teasing and bullying hasn’t changed much over the centuries:
If you are so unfortunate as to be pronounced a Quiz, don’t be ashamed of it.—A QUIZ generally means a regular fellow, and very often a respectable man.
You see one denominated a Quiz because he hangs his gown up every night, and brushes it, and puts the tassel of his cap in a paper;—another is so called because he wears his hair, or the fashion of his buckles, different from others of his own age.—If you have reasons for these distinctions, be not afraid to own them; say boldly in the words of Horace,
“Justum et tenacem, &c.” [just and tenacious, etc.]
If you have no reasons, you may as well conform to the general custom of people about you.
That same year, 1785, Francis Grose includes it in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:
QUIZ, a strange looking fellow, an odd dog.
Around this time, quiz could also mean a type of toy, also called a bandalore, that is an early form of what we now call a yo-yo. This sense of quiz appears in this rather misogynistic passage in the 1792 Sequel to the Adventures of Baron Munchausen:
As to the matrons, to prevent an eternal and confused prattle that would drown all manner of intelligibility, I found it absolutely necessary to sew up their mouths; so that between the blind judges and the dumb matrons, methought, the trial had a chance of being terminated sooner that it otherwise could. The matrons, instead of their tongues, had other instruments to convey their ideas: Each of them had three quizzes, on quiz pendant from the string that sewed up her mouth, and another quiz in either hand. When she wished to express her negative, she darted and recoiled the quizzes in her right and left hand; and when she desired to express her affirmative, she, nodding, made the quiz pendant flow down and recoil again.
The toy probably got this name from being a novelty, an oddity. It is not a great leap from being considered odd to being mocked, and by 1787 the verb to quiz, meaning to mock, appears. From the humor periodical The Microcosm of 4 June 1787:
Riding through Eton about a week ago with my nose before me,
Nescio quid meditans, nugarum, et totus in illis.
[Musing on some trifle or other, and totally intent on it; Horace, Satires 1.9]Meditating, indeed, on I know not what, I was awakened from my reverie by several provincial words, the meaning of which were to me, at that time, almost unintelligible; although by the gestures which accompanied them, it was no difficult matter to discover that were not intended by way of compliment, “There’s a quiz! there’s a good one! my God! what a Gig! what a tough one! Smoke his nose!”
Notwithstanding I perceived that these expressions proceeded from several young Etonians, not one of whom had arrived at the age of thirteen, my indignation was foolishly roused. I long’d for the trumpeter’s sord, and, in the first ebullitions of rage, idly made use of some very hasty expressions. I was lucky for both parties, but especially for myself, that I had nothing in my hand but a small flexible switch. However, my anger was momentary; I soon collected all my lost philosophy, repeating those lines of Horace, to which theorists often have recourse.
———————animum rege! qui nisi paret
Imperat: hunc frænis, hunc tu compesce catenâ
[Rule your passion! For unless it obeys, it commands; restrain it with a bridle, restrain it with fetters; Horace, Epistles 1.2]But it was too late, I had provoked the boys to resentment. Several now ran to the head of my beast,
———————Nec Saxa, nec ullum
Telorum interca cessat genus.
[Nor meanwhile do stones nor any kind of missiles cease; Virgil, Aeneid, Book 2)Many pieces of mud and some stones were thrown, notwithstanding I advanced safe under cover my nose, still quizzed, and still pelted, till my quadruped arrived opposite the schoolgate.
And quiz would come to mean ridicule or mockery. From a 1795 poem Soliloquy on the Powder Tax, a parody of Hamlet’s famed soliloquy:
To pay, or not to pay? That is the question.—
Whether its better in the mind to suffer
The laughs and quizzes of the powder’d pates;
Or to take arms against so many troubles,
And by a guinea end them?
Around the same time, quiz came to mean to spy upon or watch closely, as one might stare at an odd person or thing. From Miles Peter Andrews’s 1795 play The Mysteries of the Castle:
Long has been serv’d from this our motley Stage,
Repasts for various tastes—from youth to age—
To lively Miss, escap’d from Sſhool and toil,
Our sports have oft bestow’d the infant smile,
While the rude boy, from Westminster or Eton,
Who “spies,” and “quizzes” one, where’er they meet one.
(The use of a medial or long S in Sſhool as a replacement for a < c > or as part of an initial double < s > is odd to my eyes—but I’m not an expert in eighteenth-century typographical practices. In my quotations, including the other examples in this quotation, I have replaced medial esses with the modern, round form, but I leave it as is in this word.)
This sense of watching closely or peering intently may serve as a transition to the present-day sense of quiz meaning a test in school The test sense of quiz arose in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. But this test sense could also be an independent coinage based on the Latin root at the heart of words like inquisitive. The verb to quiz, meaning to question or test, especially in the context of a school, appears in Harper’s of June 1866:
Professor H——, of the Iowa Medical College, is an inveterate joker, as his friends know to their grief. His best joking field is among the students, who semi-annually throng his school for instruction in the healing art. But once upon a time an ex-military student of his classes flanked and vanquished him by one of those deceptive movements known generically as “strategy.” Professor H—— was lecturing his class upon the diseases of the cranium generally, and accidents to that locality specially; and, to conclude, quizzed them thoroughly on the difference between fracture of the skull and concussion of the brain, and was pleased to see that all understood it, but was annoyed and pained to find that the military man couldn’t see it.
[...]
On this occasion, when he found the young man still ignorant of the subject, he patiently went through a long and tedious explanation, in the most commonplace terms, and then asked, [...] “Now what would you do first if you had a fracture of the skull?
“I think I would send for a doctor?”
Such a shout as greeted the disgusted Professor at this reply would have broken up a Western camp meeting. There was no more lecturing that day.
And the next year William James uses the noun quiz, meaning such a text or exam, in an 1867 letter that also demonstrates that precarious career prospects of academics are nothing new:
At present my health is so uncertain that I cannot look forward to teaching physiology. As a central point of study I imagine that the border ground of physiology and psychology, overlapping both, would be as fruitful as any, and I am now working on to it. But a cultivator thereof can make no money. Occasional review articles, etc., perhaps giving “quizzes” in anatomy and physiology, and getting work to do for medical periodicals, may help along. If I wrote with more facility I fancy the latter might be productive. My ambition is modest, as you see, but my wants will not be numerous.
In addition to the supposed Latin etymology, there is another, almost certainly specious, origin story for quiz. The following appeared in an 1836 pronouncing dictionary, titled Walker Remodelled, and has been repeated many times since:
All these words, which occur only in vulgar or colloquial use, and which Webster traces to learned roots, originated as a joke: Daly, the manager of a Dublin play-house, wagered that a word of no meaning should be the common talk and puzzle of the city in twenty-four hours; in the course of that time the letters Q,u,i,z were chalked or pasted on all the walls of Dublin with an effect that won the wager.
Richard Daly was an Irish actor and theater manager, and in 1779-80 he returned to Dublin from London and purchased the Smock Alley Theatre. So, the chronology works for this explanation, but there is little else to recommend its veracity. The early citations of quiz are not associated with Ireland.
Sources:
Andrews, Miles Peter. The Mysteries of the Castle. London: T.N. Longman, 1795, 3. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
“Editor’s Drawer.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, June 1866, 134–35. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. quiz, n., quiz, v.
Grose, Francis. A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. London: S. Hooper, 1785, s.v. quiz. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
James, William. Letter (26 December 1867). Ralph Barton Perry. The Thought and Character of William James, vol. 1 of 2. Boston: Little Brown, 1935, 254. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Microcosm, no. 29, 4 June 1787, 336–38. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2008, modified, December 2020, s.v. quiz, n., quiz, v.1, quizzical, adj.; June 2008, modified June 2018, s.v., quizzy, adj.1.
A Sequel to the Adventures of Baron Munchausen. London: H.D. Symonds and J. Owen, 1792, 177–79. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
Smart, B.H. Walker Remodelled: A New Critical Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language, London: T. Cadell, 1836, s.v. Quizzing, s. and a.
“Soliloquy on the Powder Tax” (August 1795). The Kentish Register, and Monthly Miscellany, vol. 3. Canterbury: Simmons and Kirkby, 1795, 310. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
Ten Minutes Advice to Freshmen. Cambridge: J. Archdeacon, 1785, 31–32. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
Tréguer, Pascal. “Origin of ‘Quiz’ (‘Vir Bonus Est Quis?’)?” Wordhistories.net, 12 May 2017.
Wittol, Roger. An Incredible Bore: A Familiar Epistle. London: G. Kearsly, 1780, 13–14. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
Image credit: Edwin Henry Landseer, “Quiz,” 1839, oil on canvas, Royal Collection. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a work created before 1927.