quiz

Where it comes from

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.