Quiz

Part of speech: noun, verb

Pronunciation: /kwɪz/

Definitions

1. A short test or examination designed to assess knowledge or skills on a specific subject
2. A concise evaluation format intended to measure knowledge, understanding, and skills in a particular area through a series of questions and answers
3. A brief assessment often used in education to quickly evaluate learning ; an interactive game where participants answer questions to win points or prizes

Etymology: Around 1780, calling someone a quiz did not mean you planned to test them. It meant you found them ridiculous: an oddity, an eccentric, a person worth staring at. The question-and-answer sense came decades later, and nobody knows where the original came from. That gap has drawn one of the most cheerful legends in English. Richard Daly, a Dublin theatre proprietor, supposedly bet that he could launch a meaningless word into the language overnight. He sent people out to paint four letters on walls across the city, and by morning all Dublin was asking what they meant. The story is irresistible and unsupported. No evidence backs the stunt, and the word was already being written down in the 1780s. The tale explains why a nonsense word might catch on, not where this one came from. Contemporaries were puzzled too. A column from 1785 offered a university joke: Horace's line "vir bonus est quis?", "who is the good man?", playfully mistranslated at Cambridge as "the good man is a quiz." The pun fits the word's early flavour, which leaned toward the harmless, earnest, over-correct sort of man that a later age would call a square or a nerd. But it reads like a clever after-the-fact story, and no one has proved it. Another theory traces the word to "qui es?", Latin for "who are you?", supposedly the opening question of oral examinations, but it depends on dates that are demonstrably wrong. A nineteenth-century dictionary proposed a link to a popular toy and a dialect form of "whiz", without much more to support it. Whatever its source, the word bred a little family of mockery. By 1796 there was a verb meaning to hoax someone or make fun of them. A quizzing glass, a single eyeglass for peering at people, is recorded from 1802. Slang produced "quisby", meaning odd, not quite right, or even bankrupt, by about 1807. Someone could be "quizified", turned into a figure of fun, by 1834. And "quizzical" grew from the same old noun, describing someone odd or comical before it settled on the raised eyebrow of amused doubt. The great change came through the verb. By 1847 it is recorded meaning simply to question or interrogate. Some suggest that the slide from mockery to questioning was helped along by the sound of "question" and "inquisitive", but no one can say for certain how it happened. Teachers took the verb up, and by the mid-nineteenth century a quiz was an oral examination, and soon a short test of any kind. From the classroom it moved into parlour games and, eventually, to contests for prizes, while the old meaning of the person everyone laughed at lingers only in a quizzical look.

Synonyms: test, exam, assessment, evaluation, questionnaire

Antonyms: discussion, lecture, presentation, explanation, tutorial