A contest is a form of game or mental sport, in which players (as individuals or teams) try to answer the questions correctly. In some countries, a questionnaire is also a brief evaluation used in education and similar fields to measure the growth of knowledge, skills and / or skills. Questionnaires are often punctuated in points and many questionnaires are designed to determine a winner of a group of participants, usually the participant with the highest score.
The first attested use of the word is from 1781 and means a strange person. This sense survives today in the word quizzical. It was also used in term interrogative glass, a common accoutrement of the British Regency dandies. Later it acquired a meaning of to make fun of, or to make fun of. How it acquired its current sense of a test is unknown, but that sense did not appear until 1867 and then it was in the United States.
The Oxford English Dictionary attests to the use of the verb quiz to mean "to interrogate or interrogate," with a reference from 1843: "It gives us a 'quiesed us', which might be a clue to its origin. to be from the English dialect verb quiset, which means "to question." In any case it is probably of the same root as question and inquisitive.
There is a well-known myth about the word quiz which says that in 1791 a Dublin theater owner named Richard Daly made a bet that he could enter a word in the language in 24 hours. He then went out and hired a group of street urchins to write the word "contest", which was a nonsense word, on the walls around the city of Dublin. In one day, the word was common currency and had acquired a meaning (since no one knew what it meant, everyone thought it was some kind of proof) and Daly had some extra money in his pocket. However, there is no evidence to support the story, and the term was already in use prior to the alleged bet in 1791.