Quiz once meant eccentric person before it meant questions
A quiz is a mind sport of answering questions on one or many topics—also a short classroom check. The word appears by 1780 with unknown origin, perhaps student slang, first denoting an odd person or a hoax before shifting toward interrogation. A Dublin bet myth about Richard Daly inventing it in 1791 is folklore.
Before it meant questions, the word described an odd or eccentric person, or a joke or hoax. Perhaps through association with words like inquisitive, it shifted toward watching or studying intently, and from about the middle of the nineteenth century it came to mean a test. The popular tale says the Dublin theatre owner Richard Daly bet in 1791 that he could launch a new word within 24 hours, hired street children to chalk the nonsense syllable on walls across the city, and found everyone using it by the next day, but the 1780 examples rule that out.
Competitive quizzes may cover pot-luck general knowledge or one subject. The British Quizzing Championships are held every year, and quiz shows turn the format into television and radio entertainment. Guinness lists the biggest quiz ever as the Quiz for Life at the Flanders Expo halls in Ghent on 11 December 2010, where 2,280 people took part. Victory went to Café De Kastaar, a five-strong team from Leuven whose members included Tom Trogh and Erik Derycke.
In classrooms in the United States, Canada, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic and some Indian colleges, a quiz is a shorter, easier and quicker assessment than a test. Some teachers set a daily or weekly one of five to thirty easy questions so students review before the next lesson, and a pop quiz arrives with no warning.
Personality quizzes, made popular by women’s magazines such as Cosmopolitan and now everywhere online, score multiple-choice answers against a key with no right or wrong responses. They are rarely psychometrically valid, though they can prompt useful reflection.
Source: Quiz
