Christie’s International Ltd., based in London, is about to start operations in New York. Christie’s is:
a. A brewer famous for its stout.
b. A travel agency with which the actor Robert Morley is associated.
c. An auction house that is an arch competitor of Sotheby Parke Bernet.
This question (we’re guessing you know the answer) appeared in The New York Times’s first weekly News Quiz on Saturday, Oct. 2, 1976. (The Times had published some quizzes before that date, though they were not labeled the News Quiz.) In 1989, The Times declared there would be “no more tests on Saturday” and discontinued the quiz. But it was restored in 2018, to the delight of curious and competitive readers.
How did the word “quiz” come to be? There’s no clear answer. As the legend goes, in the late 1700s a theater manager in Dublin bet he could introduce a new word to the public, and they’d assign it a meaning. “Quiz” soon appeared in chalk on walls around the city. Grant Barrett, a co-host of the radio show “A Way With Words,” and other word scholars say there is probably no truth to the tale. But, Mr. Barrett said, there is a through line: “All of the senses that we know of this word have an element of mystery.” He added that “quiz” may have derived from “inquisitive,” or the Latin “qui es,” or “who are you?”
The first definition of “quiz” arrived in the 1780s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and meant “an odd or eccentric person; a person whose appearance is peculiar or ridiculous.” According to the etymologist Jess Zafarris, “quiz” was also used around this time at some universities, such as Cambridge and Oxford, as a label for someone who was unusually studious. “It was an early term for a nerd,” she said in an interview.
In an 1862 roundup of book and poetry reviews, The Times use the word to describe an author, John Phoenix: “Americans, from Labrador to Cape Horn, on shipboard or on solid land, have roared over the oddities of this Alta Californian quiz.”
By 1795, “quiz” also meant “a practical joke” or “hoax,” according to the O.E.D. In a note in The Times in 1863, columnists clarified that a report on “a meeting of gentlemen” at Delmonico’s restaurant in New York, published days before, was “intended merely as a satirical quiz.” Adding insult to injury, the columnists wrote: “We did not suppose any one could take it to be a serious report.”
By the late 19th century, “quiz” had adopted the meaning we most often use today, a set of questions that tests a person’s knowledge of a given topic. It was a natural outgrowth, Mr. Barrett said, of the joke definition: to understand a joke, you have to be part of an in-group. And to score high on a quiz, you have to know the material. “It requires a breadth of knowledge,” he said.
Today, The Times uses quizzes to allow readers to put their smarts to the test. In 2023, the Upshot released the Flashback quiz, which asks readers to put a series of events in chronological order on a timeline. The Learning Network publishes a weekly quiz for students. And of course, there’s the News Quiz, which asks readers how well they know the week’s biggest headline-making news.
Tom Wright-Piersanti, who started editing and co-writing the News Quiz in 2021, said in an interview that even though putting the quiz together is fun, it’s challenging to represent the week’s top news in just a few questions. “We don’t ignore stories because they’re serious,” he said. “But you have to ask questions in a way that doesn’t feel silly or trivializing.”
So go ahead, give this week’s quiz a shot. And don’t worry: You’re not being graded.
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