quiz1
/kwɪz
/- It is where I went to school, go to Church, sometimes shop, am involved in a pub quiz team, and where I stood twice in District Council elections.
- I realise that I have been blessed with an exceptionally absorbent and retentive memory - oh you want me on your pub quiz team!
- Next Tuesday a general knowledge quiz open to teams of four will be held.
Synonyms
Synonyms
- Students are assessed through three problem-solving quizzes and three multiple-choice examinations.
- One of the things that my students get the most use from are the interactive quizzes that I have written to help them study for the tests.
- Police have been granted an extra 24 hours to quiz a man in connection with the murder.
- According to the survey, bosses thought the most effective method of reducing absence was ‘return to work’ interviews, whereby a returning employee is quizzed about the illness.
- Why can't the paper just say that a suspect is being questioned, rather than quizzed?
Synonyms
- The entire course consists of ten booklets that teach a skill, then quiz the student on information recently learned.
- The teacher has handed out worksheets describing the weapons and siege engines which could have been used, and she is quizzing pupils about them.
Origin
Mid 19th century (as a verb; originally US): possibly from quiz2, influenced by inquisitive.
The credit for inventing the word quiz is sometimes given to a late 18th-century Dublin theatre proprietor called Daly. He is said to have made a bet that he could introduce a new word into the language within 48 hours, and to have hired a number of street urchins to chalk the nonsensical quiz on walls all over the city. The next day all Dublin was talking about this new word. Unfortunately, there is no evidence to support this story. What we do know is that quiz was first used to mean either ‘an odd or eccentric person’, or ‘an odd-looking thing’, as in ‘Where did you get that quiz of a hat?’ (Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, 1798). As a verb it originally meant ‘to mock or make fun of someone’. The use of the word for a test of knowledge came later, in the 1860s, and might have been influenced by the word inquisitive. See also million
Rhymes
quiz2
/kwɪz/Derivatives
quizzer
- Nobody likes a clever-clogs, however, especially not on television and so many of the quizzers play strategically dumb during the audition process in order to increase the sense of dramatic tension.
- Needless to say, young quizzers are encouraged.
- The quizmaster went back a happy man despite the turnout, as this was ‘a focussed bunch of quizzers, who answered most queries’.
Origin
Late 18th century: sometimes said to have been invented by a Dublin theatre proprietor who, having made a bet that a nonsense word could be made known within 48 hours throughout the city, and that the public would give it a meaning, had the word written up on walls all over the city. There is no evidence to support this theory.
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