quiz

Meanings

Noun

• An odd, puzzling or absurd person or thing.
• One who questions or interrogates; a prying person.
• A competition in the answering of questions.
• A school examination of less importance, or of greater brevity, than others given in the same course.

Verb

• To hoax; to chaff or mock with pretended seriousness of discourse; to make sport of, as by obscure questions.
• To peer at; to eye suspiciously or mockingly.
• To question (someone) closely, to interrogate.
• To instruct (someone) by means of a quiz.
• To play with a quiz.

Origin

• 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 ().
• 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.