Questions and Answers - Language Trivia

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Language trivia.

Fun trivia questions and answers - Language.

What does a deltiologist collect?
A: Postcards

When a knight of yore sported a panache, what was he wearing?
A: Plumes of feathers atop his helmet.

What is Guido's scale?
A: The musical exercise we know as do,re,mi,fa,sol, la-devised by eleventh-century Benedictine monk Guido d' Arezzo. The last two syllables-ti and do were added later.

What is the definition of "zax"--the highest-scoring three-letter word possible in the game of Scrabble?
A: A zax is a tool for cutting and trimming roof slates. In Scrabble, it earns a minimum score of 19 points--and much more if one or more of the consonants is placed on a bonus square.

In the radio communications alphabet that begins :Alpha, Bravo, Charlie," what names of Shakespearean characters are used to denote letters?
A: Romeo and Juliet.

What is "wagger pagger bagger" slang for in England?
A: Wastepaper basket.

How fast is hypersonic?
A: More than five times the speed of sound--or above Mach 5. The speed of sound is about 740 miles an hour at sea level.

What are you afraid of if you have ergophobia?
A: Work.

What is a dentiloquist?
A: Someone who speaks through clenched teeth.

What does an ammeter measure?
A: Electric current--it measures the strength of an electric current in amps.

In the world of computers what is spam?
A: Junk email.

What kind of voice does someone have if he or she is oxyphonic?
A: Unusually shrill.

In the world of gardening, what is a clairvoyee?
A: A window like hole cut in a hedge.

What are zoonoses?
A: Animal diseases communicable to man.

In weaving, what's the weft, or woof?
A: The yarn that's threaded over and under the strands of yarn that run parallel along the length of the cloth. The parallel strands are known as the warp.

What is a neuroblast?
A: A newly formed nerve cell.

Synonyms are words with he same or nearly the same meaning. What are heteronyms?
A: Words that are spelled the same but have different meanings ad often different pronunciations--such as minute, meaning "60 seconds", and minute, meaning "tiny."

What words were combined to form the word contrail--the visible cloudlike streak left behind by jet airplanes?
A: Condensation and trail.

In Japan, what automobile accessory is known as a bakkumira?
A: The rear-view mirror. The Japanese word was drawn from the English words--back and mirror.

What is the meaning of the legal term involuntary conversion?
A: Loss or destruction of property through theft, accident or condemnation.

What is a triolet?
A: A poem. It's an eight-line poem having a rhyming scheme of ab aa ab ab, with its first line repeated as the fourth and seventh lines, and the second line repeated as the eighth line.

When it comes to waves in the ocean, what is a wavelength?
A: The linear distance between the crests of two successive waves.

The word peninsula is derived from the Latin words paine and insula. What do they mean?
A: Paene means "almost"; "insula," island.

What information is sought in a Schick test? How about a Dick test?
A: Both are skin tests--the first to determine an individual's susceptibility to diphtheria and the second to determine susceptibility to scarlet fever.

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Language trivia.