Trivia is information and data that are considered to be of little value.

Modern usage of the termtrivia dates to the 1960s, when college students introduced question-and-answer contests to their universities. A board game,Trivial Pursuit, was released in 1982 in the same vein as these contests. Since the beginning of its modern usage, trivia contests have been established at various academic levels as well as casual venues such as bars and restaurants.

Theancient Romans used the wordtriviae to describe where one road split or forked into two roads. Triviae was formed fromtri (three) andviae (roads) – literally meaning "three roads", and in transferred use "a public place" and hence the meaning "commonplace."^[1]The Latin adjectivetriviālis in Classical Latin besides its literal meaning could have the meaning "appropriate to the street corner, commonplace, vulgar." Inlate Latin, it could also simply mean "triple."

Inmedieval Latin, thetrivia (singulartrivium) came to refer to the lower division of theArtes Liberales:grammar,rhetoric, andlogic. These were the topics of basic education, and were foundational to thequadrivia of higher education:arithmetic,geometry,music, andastronomy.

The adjectivetrivial introduced into English in the 15th to 16th century was influenced by all three meanings of the Latin adjective:

• A 15th-century English translation ofRanulf Higden mentions thearte trivialle, referring to thetrivium of the Liberal Arts.^[2]
• The same work also callsa triuialle distinccion a threefold division. This is due to an application of the term byArnobius, and was never common either in Latin or English.^[3]
• The meaning "trite, commonplace, unimportant, slight" occurs from the late 16th century, notably in the works ofShakespeare.^[4]

Trivia was used as a title byLogan Pearsall Smith in 1902,^[5] followed byMore Trivia andAll Trivia in 1921 and 1933, respectively, collections of short "moral pieces" or aphorisms. Book II of the 1902 publication is headed with a quote from "Gay'sTrivia, or New Art of Walking Streets of London.",

"Thou, Trivia, goddess, aid my song: Through spacious streets conduct thy bard along."^[6]

Trivialities, Bits of Information of Little Consequence was the title of a popular book by Britishaphorist Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946), first published in 1902 but popularized in 1918 (withMore Trivia following in 1921 and a collected edition including both in 1933). It consisted of short essays often tied to observation of small things and commonplace moments.Trivia is the plural oftrivium, "a public place." The adjectival form of this,trivialis, was hence translated by Smith as "commonplace."^[7]

In the 1918 version of his bookTrivia, Smith wrote:^[7]

I know too much; I have stuffed too many of the facts of History and Science into my intellectuals. My eyes have grown dim over books; believing in geological periods, cave dwellers, Chinese Dynasties, and the fixed stars has prematurely aged me.

In the 1960s, nostalgic college students and others began to informally trade questions and answers about the popular culture of their youth. The first known documented labeling of this casual parlor game as "Trivia" was in aColumbia Daily Spectator column published on February 5, 1965.^[8] The author,Ed Goodgold, then started the first organized "trivia contests" with the help of Dan Carlinsky. Ed and Dan wrote the bookTrivia (Dell, 1966), which achieved a ranking on theNew York Times best-seller list; the book was an extension of the pair's Columbia contests and was followed by other Goodgold and Carlinsky trivia titles. In their second book,More Trivial Trivia, the authors criticized practitioners who were "indiscriminate enough to confuse the flower of trivia with the weed of minutiae"; trivia, they wrote, "is concerned with tugging at heartstrings," while minutiae deals with such unevocative questions as "Which state is the largest consumer of Jell-O?" The board gameTrivial Pursuit was released in 1982 and was a craze in the U.S. for several years thereafter.^[7]

The largest current trivia contest^[9][10] is held inStevens Point, Wisconsin, at theUniversity of Wisconsin–Stevens Point'scollege radio stationWWSP 89.9 FM. This is a student-run community station with 30,000^[11] watts of power and about a 65-mile (105-kilometre) radius, and the contest serves as a fund raiser for the station. The contest is open to anyone, and it is played in April of each year spanning 54 hours over a weekend with eight questions each hour. There are usually 400 teams ranging from 1 to 150 players. The top ten teams are awarded trophies. As of 2022, the contest is in its 52nd year.^[12]

The two longest continuous trivia contests in the world are theGreat Midwest Trivia Contest atLawrence University and theWilliams Trivia Contest, which both debuted in the spring of 1966. Lawrence hosts its contest annually. Unusually, Williams has a separate contest for each semester, and thus its 84th game took place in May 2008.

TheUniversity of Colorado Trivia Bowl was a mostly student contest featuring a single-elimination tournament based on the GECollege Bowl.^[13]

Today, many bars and restaurants host weeklytrivia nights in an effort to draw in more patrons, especially during weeknights.

• Factoid
• Jeopardy!
• Quiz bowl