Quizzed

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. To conduct a meticulous inquiry into someone's understanding To assess a person's knowledge or skills by posing a variety of questions To challenge an individual's comprehension through a detailed examination of their responses
2. Posed a series of questions to someone to evaluate their grasp or knowledge on a subject
3. Interrogated or examined a person by asking targeted questions to determine their level of understanding

Etymology: The verb "quizzed" is simply the past tense of "quiz," so its story is really the story of "quiz" itself, and that story is famously murky. The most colourful candidate is a wager. A late-18th-century Dublin theatre proprietor is said to have bet he could introduce a meaningless new word into English, had it chalked on walls across the city, and found the whole town talking about it the next morning. Nobody has documented this, so it remains a tale rather than a fact. Other theories are more sober. One holds that "quiz" began as a dialect variant of "whiz," applied to a popular toy, while another proposes an original sense of "odd person" around 1780. Some dictionaries suggest it first meant a hoax, around 1796, and only later came to mean interrogate, around 1847, possibly under the pull of "question" and "inquisitive." Attempts to link it to Latin "qui es?" (who are you?) have been shown to be wrong.

Synonyms: interrogated, examined, questioned

Antonyms: answered