40 Language and Words Trivia Questions for Kids
The easiest language and words questions in the game, picked for younger players. Every one comes with the answer and a short explanation of why it is right.
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Easy Language and Words Questions and Answers
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In shipwright, wheelwright and playwright, what does the ending '-wright' mean?
A maker or builder
Wright comes from the Old English wyrhta, a worker or maker, from the same root as work. A playwright builds a play the way a shipwright builds a ship, which is why it is never spelt playwrite.
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What does the A in NASA stand for?
Aeronautics
NASA stands for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Aeronautics is flight within the atmosphere, which is why the agency that flies to the Moon still has aircraft research in its name.
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An abbreviation built from initial letters and said as a word, rather than letter by letter, is called what?
acronym
An acronym is spoken as a word: laser and radar both started life as acronyms. When the letters are said one at a time, as in ATM, the term is initialism.
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What is a poem or text whose line-initial letters spell a message called?
acrostic
An acrostic hides a word or message in the first letters of successive lines or phrases. Similar devices can use final letters, but the initial-letter form is the classic acrostic.
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What is the name of the symbol '&'?
Ampersand
The symbol & is called an ampersand and represents the word 'and'.
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What do you call a word made by rearranging all the letters of another word?
Anagram
An anagram is a rearrangement of the letters of a word or phrase to make another word or phrase.
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What is the character or force that opposes the protagonist called?
Antagonist
The antagonist creates the central opposition faced by the protagonist, but need not be a villain. The opposing force can also be a society, nature, or an internal conflict.
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In clock times, what do the abbreviations AM and PM stand for?
Ante meridiem and post meridiem
They are Latin for 'before midday' and 'after midday', which is why noon is neither.
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What is the term for a word that means the opposite of another word?
Antonym
An antonym is a word with the opposite meaning to another, like hot and cold or arrive and leave. The word comes from Greek roots meaning 'against' and 'name'.
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Which punctuation mark can show possession or a missing letter in a contraction?
Apostrophe
An apostrophe is used in possessives and in contractions such as 'do not' becoming 'don't'.
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In which direction do the letters of an Arabic word run?
right to left
Arabic script is written from right to left, while numerals within Arabic text are commonly written left to right. Hebrew and Persian are other examples of right-to-left writing systems.
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Which term describes a word or expression retained from an earlier period but now uncommon?
Archaism
An archaism is a word or expression retained from an earlier period that is no longer commonly used. It may survive in historical writing, religious language, or deliberately old-fashioned speech, such as “thou” in English.
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What is the repetition of vowel sounds in nearby words called?
Assonance
Assonance is the echo of the same vowel sound through words close together, as in the long o running through 'the old stone road home'. It works anywhere in the word, not just at the start, and poets use it to bind a line together by sound rather than rhyme.
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Which punctuation symbol is commonly used to point to a footnote?
Asterisk
An asterisk is a star-shaped symbol often used to call attention to a note or qualification.
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Which consonant is often silent after M at word endings?
B
The final B in climb, thumb, dumb, and crumb is a spelling remnant. Earlier pronunciations included the consonant, but it was later lost in ordinary speech.
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The English word ballet was borrowed from which language?
French
Ballet entered English from French, which in turn took it from Italian balletto, meaning little dance. The deeper origin is the Italian ballare, to dance.
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Someone raised speaking both Welsh and English at home is described as what?
Bilingual
Bilingual comes from the Latin bi-, meaning two, and lingua, meaning tongue. Roughly half the world's population uses two or more languages in daily life.
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How many raised dot positions are in a standard Braille character cell?
six dots
Standard Braille uses a six-dot cell arranged in two columns of three. Eight-dot Braille also exists for expanded computer and punctuation notation, but the traditional standard cell has six.
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The geographic word canyon was borrowed into English from which language?
Spanish
Canyon comes from Spanish cañón, meaning a large gorge or tube. The ñ in the Spanish spelling is a distinct letter-like character, not simply an accented n.
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Which part of speech connects words, phrases, or clauses?
Conjunction
Conjunctions such as and, but, and because connect pieces of language and show relationships between them. Coordinating conjunctions join equal units, while subordinating conjunctions introduce dependent clauses.
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What is a pair of successive poetic lines called?
Couplet
A couplet is a two-line unit, and many famous couplets rhyme. In a heroic couplet, the two lines are typically written in rhymed iambic pentameter.
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What material was most commonly used for cuneiform writing?
Clay tablets
Wet clay was soft enough to receive marks from a reed stylus and hardened into a durable record. This is why large numbers of Mesopotamian texts survived.
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Which writing system is used for modern Russian?
Cyrillic
The alphabet is named after Saint Cyril, but it was actually devised by his followers in the First Bulgarian Empire around the 9th century, adapting Greek letters for Slavic sounds not found in Greek. It also writes Ukrainian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Mongolian, and Kazakh.
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What type of sentence makes a statement or gives information?
Declarative
A declarative sentence states something and normally ends with a full stop. 'The Earth orbits the Sun' is declarative; 'Does the Earth orbit the Sun?' is interrogative.
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Which script is commonly used to write Hindi?
Devanagari
The script's letters hang from a horizontal bar called the shirorekha, and it is also used for Sanskrit, Marathi, and Nepali. It descended from the ancient Brahmi script and is technically an abugida, where each consonant carries a built-in vowel sound unless marked otherwise.
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What literary term names a section added after a play or novel's main action?
Epilogue
An epilogue is a section added after the main action of a play or novel to wrap up events or provide a final comment. The word comes from Greek roots meaning “after” and “speech.”
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What is the study of the origins and historical development of words called?
etymology
Etymology traces words through earlier languages and historical changes in form and meaning. It can reveal unexpected connections, such as window ultimately relating to an eye of the wind.
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What is the literal meaning of the Greek root 'phobos', which gives us the word phobia?
Fear
Phobos was also the Greek god of fear and panic, and gives his name to one of Mars's two moons.
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Which common English word contains five consecutive vowels?
queueing
Queueing contains the sequence u-e-u-e-i without a consonant interrupting it. It is formed from queue plus the -ing ending.
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Which language is written using the Hangul writing system?
Korean
Hangul is the alphabet used for modern Korean. King Sejong and his scholars introduced it in the fifteenth century as a writing system easier to learn than the Chinese characters then in common use, with letter shapes that sketch the position of the tongue and lips.
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What is the term for a word that sounds the same as another but differs in meaning or spelling?
Homophone
Homophones share a pronunciation but differ in meaning, and usually in spelling too, as with pair and pear, or their, there and they're.
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What does the idiom "bite the bullet" mean?
Accept something painful and get it over with
To bite the bullet is to face something unpleasant that cannot be avoided and get through it. The phrase is usually traced to battlefield surgery before anaesthetics, when a wounded man was given something to clamp his teeth on.
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What is a fixed phrase whose meaning cannot usually be understood literally called?
Idiom
An idiom carries a settled meaning that its individual words do not add up to: breaking the ice has nothing to do with ice. Every language has thousands of them, and they are usually the last thing a learner picks up.
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What does the abbreviation 'i.e.' mean in English?
That is
Style guides differ on what follows it: American usage almost always adds a comma right after the two letters, while British usage often leaves it out. Either way, the phrase should only preface a restatement of what was just said, not a brand new example.
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What type of sentence gives a command or instruction?
Imperative
An imperative sentence tells someone to do something, as in Close the door. Its subject is often an understood you rather than a stated noun.
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What part of speech expresses a brief emotion or reaction?
Interjection
Interjections are words or short expressions that convey an immediate reaction, such as 'oh!' or 'alas!'.
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A blacksmith is named for the metal worked. Which metal is the black one?
Iron
Iron is the black metal, named for the dark oxide scale that forms on its surface when it is heated in the forge. A whitesmith worked the pale metals such as tin.
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A jovial person is cheerful and good-humoured. Which god's name is buried in the word?
Jupiter
Jovial comes from Jove, the alternative name for Jupiter. Astrologers held that anyone born under the planet Jupiter would have a merry, generous temperament.
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What initial letter is silent in both a leg joint and a cutting tool?
K
Merriam-Webster identifies K as silent in words such as knee and knife.
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The Japanese word karaoke literally means what?
empty orchestra
Karaoke combines kara, meaning empty, with oke, a shortened form of orchestra. The name refers to singing along with recorded accompaniment rather than a live band.
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