Inventors of Words Word Origin Quiz Questions

A quiz about words and the people who invented or coined them.

Word Quiz

Try to match the words below with the men who introduced them into the language, either as inventions or as the names of characters in their writings. Score yourself: 6 correct--Good; up to 12 correct--Very Good; up to 18 correct--Superior; 19 or more correct--Super.

1. yahoo a. Gelett Burgess

2. chortle b. Lewis Carroll

3. ecdysiast c. Miguel de Cervantes

4. pandemonium d. Billie DeBeck

5. nihilism e. Billie DeBeck

6. blurb f. Samuel Foote

7. quixotic g. James Hilton

8. malapropism h. James Joyce

9. lothario i. Edward Kasner

10. moron j. Edward Lear

11. gargantuan k. Samuel Lover

12. Shylock l. H. L. Mencken

13. blatant m. John Milton

14. ignoramus n. Moliere (Jean Baptiste Poquelin)

15. utopian o. Thomas More

16. runcible p. Francois Rabelais

17. debunk q. Nicholas Rowe

18. googol r. George Ruggle

19. Shangri-la s. William Shakespeare

20. heebie-jeebies t. Richard Sheridan

21. handy-andy u. Edmund Spenser

22. panjandrum v. Jonathan Swift

23. quark w. Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

24. hotsy-totsy x. William Woodward