🗣️ Idioms And Sayings Trivia Questions & Answers
Below are 30 free idioms and sayings trivia questions with answers — part of Language trivia on BUZZ. Want a real challenge that adapts to what you know? Play the Language quiz — no signup needed to start.
30 Idioms And Sayings trivia questions
Q1. What does the saying 'close but no cigar' mean?
Answer: Just short of success
💡 The phrase nods to carnivals, where cigars were the prize for winning strength or skill games.
Q2. What does it mean to 'steal someone's thunder'?
Answer: Upstage their moment
💡 It comes from a real theft — a rival stage crew reused playwright John Dennis's own thunder sound effect.
Q3. What does it mean to 'butter someone up'?
Answer: Flatter to gain favor
💡 The verb 'butter' meant flattering speech as early as 1618; the 'up' wasn't tacked on until an 1798 letter.
Q4. What does it mean if something 'costs an arm and a leg'?
Answer: Extremely expensive
💡 Despite Old West coin and portrait-painter legends, it's actually a mid-20th-century American coinage.
Q5. Which Shakespeare play gave English the phrase 'a wild goose chase'?
Answer: Romeo and Juliet
💡 In Shakespeare's day it named a horse race style, not today's hopeless pursuit.
Q6. Which Shakespeare play coined 'the green-eyed monster' for jealousy?
Answer: Othello
💡 Shakespeare had already tried 'green-eyed jealousy' earlier, in The Merchant of Venice.
Q7. What does 'once in a blue moon' mean?
Answer: Very rarely
💡 It began as 'the moon is blue' — a 1500s way of saying something was impossible, like 'when pigs fly.'
Q8. 'Cut to the chase' comes from which entertainment industry's editing habits?
Answer: Silent films
💡 Editors literally cut straight to a movie's chase scene to keep bored 1920s audiences watching.
Q9. What does 'burn the midnight oil' mean?
Answer: Work late at night
💡 The phrase predates electric light — it referred to literally burning oil-lamp fuel to see after dark.
Q10. Where does the idiom 'know the ropes' come from?
Answer: A ship's rigging
💡 A sailing ship used so much rope that knowing every line's job was basic seamanship.
Q11. The OED's favoured origin for 'kick the bucket' involves a beam used to hang what?
Answer: Slaughtered pigs
💡 In Norfolk dialect, 'bucket' can still mean this kind of beam or yoke.
Q12. 'Mad as a hatter' is linked to which occupational hazard of 18th-century hat-making?
Answer: Mercury poisoning
💡 The tremors it caused among hat-felters were nicknamed the 'hatters' shakes.'
Q13. 'Let the cat out of the bag' likely nods to a market scam involving swapping a pig for what?
Answer: A cat in a sack
💡 The unopened-sack version of the same scam gave us 'a pig in a poke.'
Q14. The naval version of 'toe the line' had sailors lined up with toes on what?
Answer: A deck plank seam
💡 Disobedient sailors could be forced to stand on that line for hours as punishment.
Q15. In 'three sheets to the wind,' a nautical 'sheet' is actually a type of what?
Answer: Rope controlling a sail
💡 Loose sheets make a ship stagger in the water much like a drunk person walking.
Q16. 'Bury the hatchet' comes from a peace ritual of which confederacy of nations?
Answer: The Iroquois Confederacy
💡 Its Peacemaker legend describes weapons buried beneath a great white pine tree.
Q17. What word did 'curiosity killed the cat' originally use instead of 'curiosity'?
Answer: Care
💡 Playwright Ben Jonson used the 'care' version back in his 1598 play Every Man in His Humour.
Q18. 'Saved by the bell' first described a fighter rescued by which boxing signal?
Answer: The round-ending bell
💡 It's from real 1890s newspaper boxing reports, not the buried-alive safety-coffin bells often credited.
Q19. Which French queen is popularly linked to hidden 'ears' in the Louvre's walls?
Answer: Catherine de' Medici
💡 The saying's earliest print form is a 16th-century French proverb, 'Les murs ont des oreilles.'
Q20. In horse racing, winning 'hands down' meant the jockey did what with the reins?
Answer: Let them go loose
💡 A jockey so far ahead could drop the reins before the finish line — no urging needed to win.
Q21. One theory ties 'skeleton in the closet' to bodies bought illegally for which practice?
Answer: Anatomical dissection
💡 Before Britain's 1832 Anatomy Act, scientists sometimes bought bodies from illicit dealers for study.
Q22. 'Spick and span' echoes a Dutch phrase describing a ship with all-new what?
Answer: Nails and wood chips
💡 Dutch 'spiksplinternieuw' described a freshly built ship — English shortened it to today's phrase by the 1600s.
Q23. 'The real McCoy' likely began as a corruption of which Scots phrase for genuine whisky?
Answer: The real MacKay
💡 An 1870 Edinburgh distillery even adopted 'the real Mackay' as its own advertising slogan.
Q24. Which 1810 essayist's grindstone tale actually coined 'an axe to grind', not Ben Franklin?
Answer: Charles Miner
💡 Franklin's memoir has a similar grindstone story, which is why he got wrongly credited for decades.
Q25. 'Caught red-handed' comes from old Scottish law requiring blood evidence for which crime?
Answer: Poaching
💡 The 'red hand' phrasing shows up in Scottish legal records as far back as 1432.
Q26. 'Barking up the wrong tree' comes from American hunters chasing which animal with dogs?
Answer: Raccoons
💡 A raccoon could fool the dogs by leaping to a different tree without being noticed.
Q27. 'Add insult to injury' comes from an Aesop fable about a bald man swatting at what?
Answer: A biting fly
💡 He misses the fly and hits his own head, adding insult to the original sting.
Q28. The 'crocodile tears' myth first spread through which type of medieval text?
Answer: Bestiaries
💡 Crocodiles do shed real tears while eating — just not out of remorse.
Q29. 'An apple a day keeps the doctor away' began as a 19th-century proverb from where?
Answer: Pembrokeshire, Wales
💡 The 1866 original rhymed: eat an apple going to bed, keep the doctor from earning his bread.
Q30. Medieval hunters who beat the undergrowth to flush out game were called what?
Answer: Beaters
💡 They worked around the bush rather than through it, to avoid startling something dangerous.
Think you know idioms and sayings?
BUZZ tracks what you’ve mastered and serves exactly what you need next. Play free — no signup to start.
PLAY FREE →