quiz [L18th] 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, while there is some evidence of it being either public school or university slang. 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.