quiz
n. · v.-
1 a game or competition (n.) A2 Elementarya game or competition where people answer questions to test their knowledge.
a competition or entertainment in which participants answer questions on various topics.
ExampleOur local pub holds a general knowledge quiz every Tuesday night.
ExampleThe charity organised a themed quiz to raise funds, attracting teams from across the city to compete for the trophy.
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2 a short school test (n.) A2 Elementary Educationa short, informal test given by a teacher to check what students have learned.
a brief or informal assessment of a student's knowledge, typically shorter and less formal than an exam.
ExampleThe teacher gave us a quick vocabulary quiz at the start of the lesson.
ExampleThe professor uses weekly unannounced quizzes to ensure that students remain current with the required reading materials.
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3 to ask questions (v.) B1 Intermediateto ask someone many questions to find out what they know or what happened.
to examine or interrogate someone by asking a series of questions.
ExampleThe police began to quiz the witnesses about what they saw during the accident.
ExampleThe journalists continued to quiz the minister on the details of the new economic policy during the press conference.
UsageOften takes the preposition 'on' or 'about' for the subject matter.
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4 an odd person (n.) C2 Proficiency Archaic Literarya person who is strange, unusual, or funny in an old-fashioned way.
an eccentric or puzzling person. This sense is largely confined to historical literature.
ExampleThe old man was a bit of a quiz, always wearing mismatched shoes and singing to himself.
ExampleIn the nineteenth-century novel, the protagonist is described as a curious quiz whose social blunders provide much of the comedy.
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.
- Nounquest
- Nounquiz