means A short test of knowledge, often given without warning, or the act of questioning someone closely.

from The origin is genuinely murky. The popular story claims a Dublin theatre manager named Daly bet he could coin a meaningless word overnight and have it in everyone's mouth by morning, chalking 'quiz' on walls across the city — a delightful tale with no real evidence behind it. More likely 'quiz' grew naturally, possibly clipped from Latin 'qui es?' ('who are you?'), a phrase any Latin student would have drilled, or simply built to sound like a puzzling, quizzical question. Its earliest recorded sense was an odd or eccentric person, only later sliding toward the testing we dread today.