In Ancient Rome, Trivium meant the lower arts. They were grammar, logic and rhetoric. Quadrivium was higher education.
Triviae means “three roads” which was a common place. These words helped to create travalis , “appropriate to the street corner“.
In 1918, a book by Logan Pearsall Smith called, “Trivialities, Bits of Information of Little Consequence”, became popular. This was one of the main starts of modern trivia.
In the 1960s, college students started to quiz each other as a game. This turned into a phenomenon after a newspaper article about it.
HQ Trivia pays out millions of dollars on it’s live game app.