Quizzing

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. The process of conducting inquiries to gauge an individual's level of knowledge or skill through targeted questioning
2. The act of posing questions in order to evaluate someone's understanding or skill level
3. Engaging in a sequence of inquiries designed to assess knowledge or comprehension on a subject

Etymology: The most famous story behind "quizzing" is a wager. A late-eighteenth-century Dublin theatre proprietor is said to have bet that he could coin a meaningless new word and get the whole English-speaking public talking about it. He supposedly had the word painted on walls across the city, and the next morning everyone was discussing it. The story is attractive but unsupported by evidence, so it is best treated as a legend. The word first appears in the 1780s, and its origin is genuinely unknown. One idea is that it began as a name for a popular toy, from a dialectal variant of "whiz". Another is that it meant "odd person" around 1780, or "hoax" by 1796. Another proposal ties it to a 1785 column that jokingly translated the Latin "vir bonus est quis" as "the good man is a quiz", a phrase supposedly used at Cambridge to describe a harmless, rule-bound fellow. The sense of "interrogate" came later, in 1847, when the word seems to have been reshaped by association with "question" and "inquisitive". That shift from a hoax or oddity to a test of someone's knowledge is what gives the present meaning. The Latin "qui es?" ("who are you?") is sometimes proposed as a source, but that explanation is shown to be incorrect by the dating of the evidence.

Synonyms: testing, examining, interrogating, questioning, grilling

Antonyms: answering, responding