Origin of Quiz

The very word of Quiz is new in the vocabulary of the English language as it does not have any Latin sources like many profound English words. It was first came into light in the late 1700 that makes it quite 318 years old.

There are numerous urban legends about the origin of the word but the most famous is certainty of Richard Daly in 1791. He was the manager of  Theatre Royal in Dublin and he made a wager with his friends to procure a new word within two days that will be spoken by everyone of Dublin. He elucidated the meaning of Quiz as a word that have neither any meaning nor derived from any known linguistic sources. Daly instructed all his staffs to write the word on every wall of the city with chalks to compel the people to plunge into the riddle of the innuendo of the meaning of Quiz. The town was stunned with the sudden appearance of this mysterious word that led Daly to win the wager and triggered the usage of the word Quiz.

On the other hand, there are also different reasons to counter this story as it was ventilated in print in the year 1835 that was 44 years after the incident of Dublin. It became small blurbs of trivia for the newspapers and magazines for padding their columns out. This story was promoted by New York Mirror, The Mirror and the London and Paris Mirror. The authorship was not attributed though as there is no possible way to find the sources of the information of those articles.

On the other hand, the trace of the word Quiz can be found even before 1791 in the 1783 by London Magazine

It may be possible that Daly created the letter but that had nothing to do with the origin of the word. In earlier times, the meaning of Quiz was utterly differnt from today as it was used as a derogatory term that means eccentric as the London Magazine put it, "one who thinks, speaks, or acts differently from the rest of the world in general." In the articles of Sporting Magazine, the quiz was depicted as a man with pedantic and rule bound characteristics as it was kind of calling one as a Nerd or Square. A quiz was termed as a subject of bullying and insults whereas To avoid the stigma of being a Quiz, young men who have but moderate allowances plunge into expenses, which make them for many years after miserable.

This interpretation ventilates that the word seems appropriate as something that rambunctious young theater employees might have written as graffiti all over Dublin, as a way to make fun of the respectable residents of Dublin. But, the word was not famous that might led to the astonishing condition of the dwellers to see a such uncommon word on one fine morning. This is considered as mere speculation as there is no contemporary accounts of newspapers to support the incident of Daly.But if Richard Daly and his theater employees didn't coin the word Quiz, how did it originate? One theory, offered by Stephen Fry, is that "it probably derives from the first question in the old grammar school Latin oral: 'Qui es?' or, 'Who are you?'"

As per the Oxford Dictionary: 'Quiz' was also used as a name for a kind of toy, something like a yo-yo, which was popular around 1790. The word is nevertheless hard to account for, and so is its later meaning of 'to question or interrogate'. This emerged in the mid-19th century and gave rise to the most common use of the term today, for a type of entertainment based on a test of a person's knowledge.

The dictionary indicates that the word came from the word 'inquisitive' which is a very old word, as old as the English language itself, having derived from the latin inquirire (to inquire).

There are numerous speculations over the origin but what matters most is the present and future. In present, Quiz is imbued with the life of us as an inseparable organ and I will hope to live and die with it by spending the interim days with the illumination of the gargantuan addiction of this word.