A history of quizzing

No evidence of quizzing has been found in records from the ancient and medieval periods. If ancient Romans or Aboriginal peoples quizzed, they did not leave anything that shows it. The earliest known appearance of the word quiz in print, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), is surprisingly recent—1782—and the word then referred to an odd-looking person. The etymology of the word is unknown. A widely repeated anecdote ascribes the word’s invention to Richard Daly, the manager of a Dublin theatre. As one version of the story goes, he wagered that he could cause a word of no meaning to become the talk of the town within 48 hours and to acquire a definite, widely adopted meaning within a week. Accordingly, he had the letters Q, U, I, and Z written across doors and shutters all over Dublin. The subsequent public response led to his winning the wager. (The anecdote’s accuracy is, unfortunately, doubtful.)

Over the course of the 19th century, the meaning of quiz changed. It was used, for example, to talk about peculiar objects. The OED cites examples of the word being used to refer to a yo-yo-like toy that became fashionable in England in the 1790s. Quiz was also used to denote a practical joke or a witticism as well as the person making it.

As a term that refers to a test of knowledge, the word quiz first appeared in print in 1867, according to the OED, when it applied specifically to a set of questions used to evaluate a person’s knowledge in an academic context. This specific sense of the word has survived and is still used by instructors to denote tests that are not long enough to qualify as examinations and are often not announced prior to being given to the surprised students. By the early 20th century, American newspapers were applying the word quiz to a form of amusement, as in “The Ben Franklin Quiz,” a regularly published game promising cash for solving pictographic puzzles. The sense of a quiz as a competition between individuals or teams became increasingly common, though exactly how or why the meaning of the word moved from peculiar objects to a competition is anyone’s guess. The OED theorizes that it may have occurred by way of association with the word inquisitive or question.

One could argue that using questions as a formal test of knowledge began in imperial China. During the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce), candidates for civil service positions were tested to determine whether they had memorized 9,000 Chinese characters. This system—which became institutionalized during this period but, arguably, can be traced hundreds of years further back—evolved into an examination lasting three days and two nights.

The British state saw the value of this meritocratic system and undertook a series of reforms in the first half of the 19th century that culminated in the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan Report, which concluded that recruitment into the civil service should be by open examinations conducted by an independent board. The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge then extended this new notion of the “test” to boys at the time of their leaving school.

Across the Atlantic, U.S. Army recruiters were coming to regard general knowledge as an indicator of whether a potential soldier was intelligent enough to serve, and evaluation soon became easier with the multiple-choice test. By the end of World War I, the multiple-choice questioning method had become the preferred mode in standardized psychological and intelligence tests, and by the 1920s it was being widely used in educational settings. Indeed, by the mid-1920s the increasing use of intelligence tests like the Army Alpha administered to recruits in World War I had led the College Board, a consortium of colleges in the northeastern United States, to commission the development of the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test).

All of these forms of quizzing have been a means to a practical end. We need to go back in time to see instances when bits of information were considered to be sources of enjoyment in themselves. As early as 1691 John Dunton, a London bookseller, launched the Athenian Gazette, which asked readers to send in questions. The answers were supplied by Dunton and his friends. The journal Notes and Queries, founded in 1849, also invited its readers to ask questions—in this case, to be answered by real experts. In 1884 the American Albert Southwick published the alliteratively titled Quizzism; and Its Key: Quirks and Quibbles from Queer Quarters: A Mélange of Questions in Literature, Science, History, Biography, Mythology, Philology, Geography, Etc. Etc., with Their Answers. In 1927 Amherst College graduates Justin Spafford and Lucien Esty published Ask Me Another!, having assembled not just numerous questions but questions asked of famous people, along with their scores and the answers. Back in England, S.P.B. Mais published Do You Know? in 1927. But none of these books gained wide public notice.

One of the earliest nonacademic competitions based on knowledge was a bee, not a quiz. The BBC’s 1938 Transatlantic Spelling Bee was a spelling match between students of Harvard and Radcliffe colleges and students of Oxford. While not a quiz per se, the event introduced listeners to the conventions of rounds and sound effects, and it was popular enough to spawn subsequent bees, leading to the General Knowledge Bee, a contest between schoolchildren from Lancashire and Yorkshire.

The popularity of that format continued to grow, and, in the U.S. during the 1930s, quizzes on general knowledge started being broadcast on the radio as a form of entertainment. Soon after World War II this concept was developed into an American radio show with two four-member teams representing various colleges competing against each other. College Bowl, as the show was called, proved to be so popular that it lasted six seasons on the radio; it then moved to television, where it ran from 1959 to 1970. It returned in 1977 in an “offline” format—in college halls and basements—and remained popular into the 21st century. Its British version, University Challenge, started in 1962 and proved highly popular on television until being taken off the air in 1987. That contest was resurrected in 1994 and continued into the 21st century; it also bred spinoffs in New Zealand and India.

But quizzing for nonacademics—a general audience, in other words—almost died a premature death. CBS Television Quiz had aired in the United States during World War II and had grown in popularity. In the 1950s, as television became increasingly popular, so did televised quiz shows. Low-stakes programs aired during the day and higher-stakes programs during prime time. Such quiz shows as Twenty-One and The $64,000 Question proved highly popular during the late 1950s. But then it came to light that both shows were heavily rigged. During the ensuing scandal, the popularity of quizzes plummeted, and almost all American quiz shows were taken off the air.

Throughout the 1960s, quiz shows survived only as daytime programming—Jeopardy! started this way in 1964—and they remained the lowest priority of TV networks until the early 1980s. A notable exception was the BBC’s Mastermind, which was created by Bill Wright, a former Royal Air Force gunner. Having been shot down over Germany during World War II, he became a prisoner of war and was repeatedly interrogated with a light in his face. He brought that experience to Mastermind, which featured contestants under a spotlight who answered questions in two rounds—the first on a specialized subject of their choice and the second on general knowledge. The show debuted in 1972 in the United Kingdom and continued into the 21st century. Despite its enduring popularity, it did not offer any high-stakes prize money.

It was not until the 1980s that quizzing reentered the public imagination in a big way. In 1980, Canadian journalists Chris Haney and Scott Abbott went to Spain, taking a set of reference books and enough money for beer, with the idea that quizzing could become something people would not only do for money but also pay money to do. They created the board game Trivial Pursuit, which they manufactured themselves after the leading American board game companies turned them down. In 1983 Time magazine reported that the entire cast of the hit movie The Big Chill “became addicted to the game.” With such stars as Glenn Close and Kevin Kline thus unintentionally endorsing it, Trivial Pursuit became a roaring success.

Meanwhile, during the 1980s and ’90s, big television quiz shows were making a comeback, starting with programs combining tests of knowledge with other games, such as Wheel of Fortune. Like that show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? took a gradual jackpot-increase approach. The U.K.’s Family Fortunes, which was derived from the U.S.’s Family Feud of the 1970s and ’80s, had contestants (members of two families) guess what answers had been given by most respondents in a survey. Jeopardy! flipped the quiz model around by having contestants guess the right questions for the answers provided to them. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire premiered in the U.S. in 1999, and its clones around the world did much to make TV quizzing popular again. John Carpenter was the first winner of the American program to reach the final answer without using a single “lifeline,” one of several opportunities allowed contestants to seek help in answering a question. Carpenter entered popular culture through a much-watched video clip in which, before giving his final answer, he used his “phone a friend” lifeline not to get help but to tell his father he was about to win a million dollars, which he then did.

The enduring legacy of quizzing for fun, which evolved partly through the success of Trivial Pursuit, could be seen during the early 21st century in local pubs and weekend meeting rooms in the shape of an open quizzing subculture, where anyone was free to form a team and participate. Quiz groups across the world held regularly scheduled contests, were constantly inventing new methods to keep quizzes exciting, and continued to have a strong and loyal following of quizzers.