Quiz

History: Attested since the 1780s, of unknown origin. * The Century Dictionary suggests it was originally applied to a popular toy, from a dialectal variant of whiz. * The Random House Dictionary suggests the original sense was "odd person" (circa 1780). * Others suggest the meaning "hoax" was original (1796), shifting to the meaning "interrogate" (1847) under the influence of question and inquisitive. * Some say without evidence it was invented by a late-18th-century Dublin theatre proprietor who bet he could add a new nonsense word to the English language; he had the word painted on walls all over the city, and the morning after, everyone was talking about it (The Pre-Victorian Drama in Dublin). * Others suggest it was originally quies (1847), Latin qui es? (who are you?), traditionally the first question in oral Latin exams. They suggest that it was first used as a noun from 1867, and the spelling quiz first recorded in 1886, but this is demonstrably incorrect. * A further derivation, assuming that the original sense is "good, ingenuous, harmless man, overly conventional, pedantic, rule-bound man, square; nerd; oddball, eccentric", is based on a column from 1785 which claims that the origin is a jocular translation of the Horace quotation vir bonus est quis as "the good man is a quiz" at Cambridge.

Origin: noun, verb

Definition: 1. An odd, puzzling or absurd person or thing. 2. One who questions or interrogates; a prying person. 3. A competition in the answering of questions. 4. A school examination of less importance, or of greater brevity, than others given in the same course. 1. To hoax; to chaff or mock with pretended seriousness of discourse; to make sport of, as by obscure questions. 2. To peer at; to eye suspiciously or mockingly. 3. To question (someone) closely, to interrogate. 4. To instruct (someone) by means of a quiz. 5. To play with a quiz.