quiz

“Quiz,” an 1839 painting by Edwin Landseer. In a demonstration of differences in size, Quiz, a Maltese dog, sits on a table, its paw on the snout of a St. Bernard. Next to him are an artist’s drawing tools. A mouse is in the foreground. Quiz belonge…

“Quiz,” an 1839 painting by Edwin Landseer. In a demonstration of differences in size, Quiz, a Maltese dog, sits on a table, its paw on the snout of a St. Bernard. Next to him are an artist’s drawing tools. A mouse is in the foreground. Quiz belonged to Queen Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent.

23 July 2021 (slightly revised 26 July 2021)

(The 26 July revision unambiguously marks the older senses of quiz as archaic, no longer in common use. It also introduces the suggestion that the sense of a test or exam is a separate, more recent coinage unrelated to the older uses and the sense meaning a bandalore.)

The origin of quiz is unknown. It arises in the late eighteenth century, and it went through a number of semantic changes before it arrived at the common meanings today of a noun meaning a test of knowledge or a verb meaning to ask questions about a topic. Given its similarity to older words like inquisitive, it may have a root in Latin, but its early uses are very much in slang and have quite different meanings, so that assumption is by no means certain.

The earliest known appearance of quiz is in a 1780 poem by Roger Wittol, An Incredible Bore. Here it means an odd or eccentric person sense that is now archaic:

T’other morning I threw off my chains with my gown,
Took a place in the Dilly and dangled to town;
(You must know ’twas a scheme, as we knowing ones say,
’Tis a BORE to be there in a d-----’d modest way)
When I found myself plac’d ’twixt a chandler’s fat wife,
And a fellow who (damme) knew nothing of life.
Me thinks ’tis a pleasantish day, says the dame,
To which I assented, the Quiz did the same:
She wish’d that these outlandish troubles would clear,
For this ’Merikin war made candles so dear.---

Our Quiz, with a head plaister’d o’er like twelfth-cake,
And a large sausage curl just above a black neck,
Had a DITTO sky-blue on, except that his breeches
Were pink, and his boot-tops were work’d with white stitches;
Notwithstanding all this I presum’d to suppose
He was going to town, to the Hummums, or Lowe’s,
Or somewhere in the Garden, where all the world goes.

Quiz quickly gave birth to the adjectives quizzical and quizzy; the latter is also now archaic. Both adjectives meant odd or peculiar and were in place by 1785.

And it appears in a 1785 pamphlet for first-year students at Cambridge University, one of the many early uses of the word coming from a school setting. The pamphlet, titled Ten Minutes Advice to Freshmen, has this to say about being teased for being a quiz, testament that schoolyard teasing and bullying hasn’t changed much over the centuries:

If you are so unfortunate as to be pronounced a Quiz, don’t be ashamed of it.—A QUIZ generally means a regular fellow, and very often a respectable man.

You see one denominated a Quiz because he hangs his gown up every night, and brushes it, and puts the tassel of his cap in a paper;—another is so called because he wears his hair, or the fashion of his buckles, different from others of his own age.—If you have reasons for these distinctions, be not afraid to own them; say boldly in the words of Horace,
            “Justum et tenacem, &c.” [just and tenacious, etc.]
If you have no reasons, you may as well conform to the general custom of people about you.

That same year, 1785, Francis Grose includes it in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:

QUIZ, a strange looking fellow, an odd dog.

Around this time, quiz could also mean a type of toy, also called a bandalore, that is an early form of what we now call a yo-yo. This sense of quiz appears in this rather misogynistic passage in the 1792 Sequel to the Adventures of Baron Munchausen:

As to the matrons, to prevent an eternal and confused prattle that would drown all manner of intelligibility, I found it absolutely necessary to sew up their mouths; so that between the blind judges and the dumb matrons, methought, the trial had a chance of being terminated sooner that it otherwise could. The matrons, instead of their tongues, had other instruments to convey their ideas: Each of them had three quizzes, on quiz pendant from the string that sewed up her mouth, and another quiz in either hand. When she wished to express her negative, she darted and recoiled the quizzes in her right and left hand; and when she desired to express her affirmative, she, nodding, made the quiz pendant flow down and recoil again.

The toy probably got this name from being a novelty, an oddity. It is not a great leap from being considered odd to being mocked, and by 1787 the verb to quiz, meaning to mock, appears. From the humor periodical The Microcosm of 4 June 1787:

Riding through Eton about a week ago with my nose before me,
Nescio quid meditans, nugarum, et totus in illis.
[Musing on some trifle or other, and totally intent on it; Horace, Satires 1.9]

Meditating, indeed, on I know not what, I was awakened from my reverie by several provincial words, the meaning of which were to me, at that time, almost unintelligible; although by the gestures which accompanied them, it was no difficult matter to discover that were not intended by way of compliment, “There’s a quiz! there’s a good one! my God! what a Gig! what a tough one! Smoke his nose!”

Notwithstanding I perceived that these expressions proceeded from several young Etonians, not one of whom had arrived at the age of thirteen, my indignation was foolishly roused. I long’d for the trumpeter’s sord, and, in the first ebullitions of rage, idly made use of some very hasty expressions. I was lucky for both parties, but especially for myself, that I had nothing in my hand but a small flexible switch. However, my anger was momentary; I soon collected all my lost philosophy, repeating those lines of Horace, to which theorists often have recourse.

———————animum rege! qui nisi paret
Imperat: hunc frænis, hunc tu compesce catenâ
[Rule your passion! For unless it obeys, it commands; restrain it with a bridle, restrain it with fetters; Horace, Epistles 1.2]

But it was too late, I had provoked the boys to resentment. Several now ran to the head of my beast,

———————Nec Saxa, nec ullum
Telorum interca cessat genus.
[Nor meanwhile do stones nor any kind of missiles cease; Virgil, Aeneid, Book 2)

Many pieces of mud and some stones were thrown, notwithstanding I advanced safe under cover my nose, still quizzed, and still pelted, till my quadruped arrived opposite the schoolgate.

And quiz would come to mean ridicule or mockery. From a 1795 poem Soliloquy on the Powder Tax, a parody of Hamlet’s famed soliloquy:

To pay, or not to pay? That is the question.—
Whether its better in the mind to suffer
The laughs and quizzes of the powder’d pates;
Or to take arms against so many troubles,
And by a guinea end them?

Around the same time, quiz came to mean to spy upon or watch closely, as one might stare at an odd person or thing. From Miles Peter Andrews’s 1795 play The Mysteries of the Castle:

Long has been serv’d from this our motley Stage,
Repasts for various tastes—from youth to age—
To lively Miss, escap’d from Sſhool and toil,
Our sports have oft bestow’d the infant smile,
While the rude boy, from Westminster or Eton,
Who “spies,” and “quizzes” one, where’er they meet one.

(The use of a medial or long S in Sſhool as a replacement for a < c > or as part of an initial double < s > is odd to my eyes—but I’m not an expert in eighteenth-century typographical practices. In my quotations, including the other examples in this quotation, I have replaced medial esses with the modern, round form, but I leave it as is in this word.)

This sense of watching closely or peering intently may serve as a transition to the present-day sense of quiz meaning a test in school The test sense of quiz arose in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. But this test sense could also be an independent coinage based on the Latin root at the heart of words like inquisitive. The verb to quiz, meaning to question or test, especially in the context of a school, appears in Harper’s of June 1866:

Professor H——, of the Iowa Medical College, is an inveterate joker, as his friends know to their grief. His best joking field is among the students, who semi-annually throng his school for instruction in the healing art. But once upon a time an ex-military student of his classes flanked and vanquished him by one of those deceptive movements known generically as “strategy.” Professor H—— was lecturing his class upon the diseases of the cranium generally, and accidents to that locality specially; and, to conclude, quizzed them thoroughly on the difference between fracture of the skull and concussion of the brain, and was pleased to see that all understood it, but was annoyed and pained to find that the military man couldn’t see it.

[...]

On this occasion, when he found the young man still ignorant of the subject, he patiently went through a long and tedious explanation, in the most commonplace terms, and then asked, [...] “Now what would you do first if you had a fracture of the skull?

“I think I would send for a doctor?”

Such a shout as greeted the disgusted Professor at this reply would have broken up a Western camp meeting. There was no more lecturing that day.

And the next year William James uses the noun quiz, meaning such a text or exam, in an 1867 letter that also demonstrates that precarious career prospects of academics are nothing new:

At present my health is so uncertain that I cannot look forward to teaching physiology. As a central point of study I imagine that the border ground of physiology and psychology, overlapping both, would be as fruitful as any, and I am now working on to it. But a cultivator thereof can make no money. Occasional review articles, etc., perhaps giving “quizzes” in anatomy and physiology, and getting work to do for medical periodicals, may help along. If I wrote with more facility I fancy the latter might be productive. My ambition is modest, as you see, but my wants will not be numerous.

In addition to the supposed Latin etymology, there is another, almost certainly specious, origin story for quiz. The following appeared in an 1836 pronouncing dictionary, titled Walker Remodelled, and has been repeated many times since:

All these words, which occur only in vulgar or colloquial use, and which Webster traces to learned roots, originated as a joke: Daly, the manager of a Dublin play-house, wagered that a word of no meaning should be the common talk and puzzle of the city in twenty-four hours; in the course of that time the letters Q,u,i,z were chalked or pasted on all the walls of Dublin with an effect that won the wager.

Richard Daly was an Irish actor and theater manager, and in 1779-80 he returned to Dublin from London and purchased the Smock Alley Theatre. So, the chronology works for this explanation, but there is little else to recommend its veracity. The early citations of quiz are not associated with Ireland.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Andrews, Miles Peter. The Mysteries of the Castle. London: T.N. Longman, 1795, 3. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

“Editor’s Drawer.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, June 1866, 134–35. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. quiz, n., quiz, v.

Grose, Francis. A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. London: S. Hooper, 1785, s.v. quiz. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

James, William. Letter (26 December 1867). Ralph Barton Perry. The Thought and Character of William James, vol. 1 of 2. Boston: Little Brown, 1935, 254. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Microcosm, no. 29, 4 June 1787, 336–38. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2008, modified, December 2020, s.v. quiz, n., quiz, v.1, quizzical, adj.; June 2008, modified June 2018, s.v., quizzy, adj.1.

A Sequel to the Adventures of Baron Munchausen. London: H.D. Symonds and J. Owen, 1792, 177–79. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Smart, B.H. Walker Remodelled: A New Critical Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language, London: T. Cadell, 1836, s.v. Quizzing, s. and a.

“Soliloquy on the Powder Tax” (August 1795). The Kentish Register, and Monthly Miscellany, vol. 3. Canterbury: Simmons and Kirkby, 1795, 310. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Ten Minutes Advice to Freshmen. Cambridge: J. Archdeacon, 1785, 31–32. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Tréguer, Pascal. “Origin of ‘Quiz’ (‘Vir Bonus Est Quis?’)?” Wordhistories.net, 12 May 2017.

Wittol, Roger. An Incredible Bore: A Familiar Epistle. London: G. Kearsly, 1780, 13–14. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Image credit: Edwin Henry Landseer, “Quiz,” 1839, oil on canvas, Royal Collection. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a work created before 1927.

two-spirit

298_twospirit.jpg

Turn-of-the-twentieth century photo of We’wha, a Zuni lahamana, a male-bodied person who wears a mixture of men’s and women’s clothing and performs social and ceremonial roles associated with women. A Zuni person in traditional dress sitting on the floor and weaving.

21 July 2021

Two-spirit or two-spirited is a term for Indigenous North American people who do not conform to the cis-heterosexual norm of white, settler-colonist society. It is a relatively recent coinage, created as a calque of the Ojibwe niizh manidoowag, but that phrase has no traditional cultural significance or currency in Ojibwe culture. Two-spirit is an English-language term.

The concept of gender variability is not consistent across Indigenous North American cultures, and different tribes have their own terms with meanings that fit the cultural contexts of each particular group. Such terms include: nádleehé (Navajo), winkte (Lakota), warharmi (Kamia), hwame (Mohave), and lhamana (Zuni).

Two-spirit evokes the concept, present in some Indigenous traditions, of a person who presents the affect of both male and female genders, while biologically conforming to either the male or female sex. But from its coinage, two-spirit has been used as an umbrella term, including people from across the spectrum of gender variability, including those who in settler-colonist contexts would be labeled as gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, queer, transgender, non-binary, drag queen, or butch.

Two-spirit was coined at the Third Annual Inter-Tribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference held in 1990 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It was deliberately invented as a replacement for the French word berdache, which had been borrowed into English by anthropologists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This word and its English variant bardash also have the sense of a male prostitute, and as a result, despite being widely used in scholarly literature, berdache and bardash are considered to be slurs. But a new term was needed because the usual English ones, such as gay or lesbian, did not reflect the unique aspects of gender variability in Indigenous cultures. Thus, two-spirit was coined.

There is testimony as to the coinage of the term at the 1990 Winnipeg conference, but as far as I can tell there are no written proceedings from that meeting. The earliest written use of two-spirit I have found is in the name of an Indigenous women’s dance troupe. An article in Boston’s Gay Community News of 25 May 1991 mentions a scheduled performance of that group at the National Lesbian Conference in Atlanta, held 24–28 April 1991, that was cancelled because of organizational and diversity concerns:

The Two Spirited Dance Troupe, a Native American company, was scheduled to open the Thursday night plenary session. However, in solidarity with Spotted Eagle, the group did not perform. By this time Spotted Eagle had her own schedule changed so many times without being consulted that she decided to opt out.

By that fall, two-spirit was appearing in mainstream newspapers as an adjective, albeit in quotation marks. From the Minneapolis Star Tribune of 9 September 1991:

Some Indians said that, before boarding schools and white missionaries erased many traditional tribal beliefs, “two-spirit” people—gays and lesbians—held places of honor in native cultures.

Now, some American Indian gays and lesbians contend, European biases have replaced those old traditions.

Two-spirit, however, is not a universally accepted term, and even those who regard it as a valuable addition to the language recognize that it has its limitations. In the introduction to their 1997 book Two-Spirit People, a collection of articles on Native American gender and sexuality, editors Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang write:

The English phrase two-spirit, which originated primarily in urban Native American/First Nations contexts where English serves as a lingua franca to bridge cultural and linguistic differences, is not meant to be translated into Native American languages and terms. To do so may change the common meaning it has acquired since the early 1990s by self-identified two-spirit Native Americans. In some cultural contexts, translating it to a Native language could even be dangerous. For example, if "two-spirit" were translated into one of the Athapaskan languages (such as Navajo or Apache) the word could be understood to mean that such a person possesses both a living and a dead spirit—not a desirable situation. If "two-spirit" were translated into Shoshone, the literal translation would be "ghost." As a generic term for Native American gays, lesbians, transgendered individuals, and other persons who are not heterosexual or who are ambivalent in terms of gender, it is used in urban and rural environments, but not by all Native Americans who are, for example, self-identified as "gay," "lesbian," "bisexual," "transgender," or "third gender" (that is, people who are neither women nor men within systems of multiple genders). Some reject the term just as others reject "berdache."

And Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice, in his 2018 Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, notes:

It was coined to affirm the spiritual and cultural groundings of queer Indigenous folks, and to argue that Indigenous gender diversity and same-sex relationships included but were more than sexual acts or proclivities. It’s an important term of self-affirmation, and one that many people use today, especially in Canada. But it’s also a pan-Indigenous term that in many cases presumes a generic similarity across cultures, which is decidedly not the case, and does not translate well into many culturally specific understandings from communities with historical roles that we might today identify as similar to gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender identities. That doesn’t mean we didn’t or don’t exist in these communities—that we didn’t or don’t matter. It just means that the broad concept of “two-spirit” might not be the best terminology for describing the culturally specific realities of gender diversity and sexuality expressions in all contexts.

Discuss this post

Sources:

BonaDea, Maridee. “‘The Point Is We Tried’; The National Lesbian Conference Was at Times Contentious, at Times Victorious.” Gay Community News (Boston), 25 May 1991, 9. ProQuest: Magazines.

de Vries, Kylan Mattias. “Berdache (Two-Spirit).” Encyclopedia of Gender and Society, Jodi O’Brien, ed. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, 2009.    

Driskill, Qwo-Li, Daniel Heath Justice, Deborah A. Miranda, and Lisa Tatonetti, eds. Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature. Tucson: U of Arizona Press, 2011, 4–6.

Jacobs, Sue-Ellen, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds. Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality. Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 1997, 2, 3–4. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Justice, Daniel Heath. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2018, 102–03.

Kelly, Suzanne P. “Gays Seek Niche in Minority Communities: Balancing Racial and Sexual Identities Can Be Difficult.” Star Tribune (Minneapolis), 9 September 1991, 9A. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Lang, Sabine. “Various Kinds of Two-Spirit People.” In Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds. Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality. Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 1997, 100, 103. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, draft additions, June 2015, s.v. two, adj., n., and adv.

Photo credit: John K. Hillers, c.1871–c.1907. U.S. National Archives. Public domain image.

Columbia

WWI-era depiction of a personified Columbia reaching out to the American people. A woman in stars-and-stripes clothing, including a star-spangled liberty cap, facing the viewer with arms outstretched

WWI-era depiction of a personified Columbia reaching out to the American people. A woman in stars-and-stripes clothing, including a star-spangled liberty cap, facing the viewer with arms outstretched.

20 July 2021

Columbia is a poetic name for the Americas, and more specifically the United States. The name, of course, is homage to the genocidal killer Christopher Columbus, who stumbled upon the Americas by mistake, and who never, despite overwhelming evidence that he had not, in fact, reached Asia, admitted his error. There are numerous places named after the man, but the most prominent in English-speaking North America are the District of Columbia, the Columbia River, and British Columbia.

There is no single Indigenous name for the Americas. Perhaps the closest is Turtle Island, a name given by some North American Indigenous cultures to their homeland. The name comes from a legend that the earth was formed on the back of a turtle swimming in the sea of the universe.

Of course, the early European settler-colonists did not hold the Indigenous cultures they encountered in any regard. The adjectival form Columbian appears in the early seventeenth century. From Samuel Purchas’s 1625 travelogue Purchas His Pilgrimes:

And vnto Portugall was Spaine beholden for Columbus, and Columbus also for his skill, whereby the Columbian (so fitlier named, then American) World was discouered.

The feminized noun form (it is common to render Latin toponyms as feminine) Columbia is in place by the mid eighteenth century. William Douglass’s description of British possessions in North America uses the term. The last digit of the date in the digitized copy I have access to is illegible, but is probably a nine, making the date 1749. From the dates and events in the text, the book had to have been written in the closing years of that decade:

The whole Continent was called by his Name AMERICA. Here is a notable Instance of the Caprice of Mankind in giving this newly discovered Continent the Name America instead of Columbia: Americus made no Settlement, Columbus was not only the first, but also the more general Discoverer of this Land.

The United States’ constitution, written in 1789, calls for a federal district to house the country’s government, and ten square miles were carved out of Maryland and Virginia to form what would be called the District of Columbia. The newly created city was also known as Washington, probably to distinguish the new construction from the towns of Georgetown and Alexandria already existing in the district. (Virginia later reclaimed its portion, which included Alexandria.) The name District of Columbia is in place by 1791. From the Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser of 26 September 1791:

The City of WASHINGTON, in the district of Columbia, intended for the permanent seat of the Government of the United States, being now begun, a concise description of the situation, and present state of that metropolis, may not be altogether uninteresting to those at a distance.

On the other side of the continent is the Columbia River, the largest North American river to flow into the Pacific. Again, the settler-colonists ignored the Indigenous names for the river, one of which is is Nch'i-Wana (Great River) in Sahaptin, a language of the region. The Spanish dubbed the river Río de San Roque (Saint Roch River). But in 1792, American Captain Robert Gray and his ship Columbia Rediviva (Columbus Renewed) sailed into the river. Gray named the river after his ship, ignoring both the Spanish and Indigenous predecessors.

Later, the Hudson’s Bay Company established two administrative districts west of the Rockies. The northern one they designated as New Caledonia, and the southern one, which covered the Columbia River basin, was called Columbia. (Most of the HBC southern district was in what is now the United States.)

The British government took control of the territory from the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1858, and the question of what to call the new colony arose. The first choice was New Caledonia, but that name proved unsuitable because it was also the name of the French territory in the South Pacific. In a letter to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, then the British secretary of state for the colonies, Queen Victoria selected the name British Columbia. Victoria writes in the third person:

The Queen has received Sir E. Bulwer Lytton's letter. If the name of "New Caledonia" is objected to as being already borne by another colony or island claimed by the French, it may be better to give the new colony west of the Rocky Mountains another name. New Hanover, New Cornwall, and New Georgia appear from the maps to be the names of subdivisions of that country, but do not appear on all maps. The only name which is given to the whole territory in every map the Queen has consulted is "Columbia", but as there exists also a Columbia in South America, and the citizens of the United States call their country also Columbia, at least in poetry, "British Columbia" might be, in the Queen's opinion, the best name.

Three days later, the British Parliament officially named the colony British Columbia. As reported by the Manchester Guardian of 27 July 1858:

The Earl of CARNARVON, in moving the second reading of this bill, explained at some length the nature of its provisions, and stated that the Government intended to alter the name of the colony from New Caledonia to British Columbia.

Discuss this post

Sources:

“BC Geographical Names.” Province of British Columbia, accessed 8 July 2021.

Douglass, William. A Summary, Historical and Political, of the First Planting, Progressive Improvements, and Present State of the British Settlements in North-America. Boston: Rogers and Fowle, c.1749, 65. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020, s.v. Columbia, District of Columbia, British Columbia. Oxfordreference.com.

“For the Maryland Journal” (26 September 1791). Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, 30 September 1791, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Columbian, adj. and n.

“Parliamentary Proceedings.” Manchester Guardian, 27 July 1858, 3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Purchas, Samuel. Purchas His Pilgrimes, book 2 of 5. London: William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, 1625, §2.1.4, 8. Early English Books Online.

Rayburn, Alan. Oxford Dictionary of Canadian Place Names. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford UP Canada, 1999.

Victoria. “Queen Victoria Names British Columbia, 24 July 1858.” Royal Collection Trust, RCIN 5100111. Accessed 8 July 2021.

Image credit: Paul Stahr. “Be Patriotic,” c.1917–18, gouache on paper. National Archives. Public domain image.

think outside the box

Illustration of the connect-the-dots puzzle that accompanied the 1971 article in Data Management

Illustration of the connect-the-dots puzzle that accompanied the 1971 article in Data Management

19 July 2021

To think outside the box is to disregard artificial constraints on creativity, to engage in unconventional thought processes. The phrase as we know it arises from a puzzle used as an exercise in creative thinking. The phrase also has a precursor with slightly different wording: think outside the dots.

In the puzzle, nine dots are arranged on a 3×3 grid, and the participants are asked to connect the dots with four straight lines and without lifting the pencil from the paper. Most participants will keep their lines within the box defined by the grid, but the only solution, as shown in the accompanying illustration, is to extend the lines beyond the boundaries of the grid. The point being the restriction of keeping within the boundaries is an artificial one, imposed by the participants themselves and by extension that other, real-world, problems can be solved if only people disregard analogous artificial constraints.

While the phrase arose in the middle of the twentieth century, the metaphor underlying it is quite old, older than the puzzle itself. For example, there is this from an 1888 account of the British Parliament that uses think outside the lines:

He said that, having changed at Mr. Gladstone’s signal, from all but unanimous repudiation of Home Rule in 1885, to its enthusiastic support in 1887, the Liberal party became a one-man party, which scarcely ventured to think outside the lines prescribed by its dictator.

Other such framing of the metaphor can undoubtedly be found.

The earliest reference to the puzzle that I have found is in a religion column by the Rev. John F. Anderson in the Dallas Morning News of 30 October 1954. Anderson relates an account, real or imagined, of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor using the puzzle in a class with graduate students. He uses go outside the dots; the think would come a bit later:

“But prof,” one student protested, “that is not fair. You went outside the dots.”

“Who said you couldn’t?” was his disarming reply.

“Young men,” he continued, “we are not here to go through old routines. Don’t let your thinking be contained in a small square of knowledge. Learn to go “outside the dots” and you may be the one to solve some of man’s most puzzling problems.

A later use (see below) of the phrase by another preacher, makes me think the anecdote may have circulated in volumes of sermon illustrations that provide preachers with ideas for sermons.

But within a decade the puzzle and its accompanying lesson starts appearing in business management courses. From an article about just such a course in the 18 April 1963 Springfield Union:

We must ask ourselves: “What are the actual boundaries of the problem?” Perhaps, some of you have seen this little problem before. Here are nine dots, arranged in a square[.]

The problem is to connect all the dots by drawing four straight lines without removing the chalk from the black board and without retracing. Try it!

Did you first attempt to draw the lines within the boundaries of the nine dots? There is no rule that requires it. The solution demands that some of the lines extend into the space outside the dots.

And again from the Dallas Morning News, this time of 15 May 1964, is this list of courses at a conference of women accountants:

Speakers and their subjects will be Miss Ouida Albright of Fort Worth, Effective Use of Your Time; Mrs. Lauer, Managerial Accounting; Miss Ruth Reynolds of Tulsa, Okla., Internal Controls; Mrs. Engel, How to Conduct a Conference; Mrs. Mary Crowley, Going Outside the Dots, and C.L. Bateman of Tulsa, Cost Reduction in the Office.

But we don’t have the full think outside the dots. That comes by 23 May 1970 in a column in the Ottawa Journal. It uses the phrase, but the column makes no explicit reference to or explanation of the puzzle. The writer assumes the reader is familiar with it, or at least with the concept:

The problem, says William Davd [sic] Hopper, is to think “outside the dots” about questions of how to feed a hungry world.

He means that the need is to think imaginatively, creatively about the development of less-developed countries, and not merely to keep pouring more money and technology into patterns of foreign aid established, not very successfully, over the past 20 years.

While the column co-locates all the words in the phrase, its use of quotation marks separates think from outside the dots, indicating that the think was not yet part of the standard phrasing.

We get the complete phrase by 6 July 1980, when it appears in another newspaper column, this time in the Miami Herald:

Mrs. Roe was my English teacher in junior high school in Miami. One dictum ruled her classroom—and, I suspect, her life—and occasionally in a fit of passion she’d scrawl on the blackboard in letters a foot high: THINK OUTSIDE THE DOTS!

More often she uttered it—hurled it, really—and everyone came to know the pattern, to watch for it, to even relish it. She’d ask a question, get no response. A minute would pass while she still stared at us: a hush would fall. Then all at once she’d cry, “Think outside the dots! Think outside the dots!”

Think outside the dots is still in use, although it is far less common than think outside the box. Here is a more recent example of think outside the dots from the Trenton Evening Times of 28 February 2010:

Challenge brings success
Architect J. Robert Hillier says you have to “think outside the dots”

[...]

“It’s a great puzzle,” he explains, brandishing a pencil and solving the challenge. “But you have to go outside the dots. You have to extend the line beyond the rectangle. That the trouble with so many people.

“When people are confronted with the puzzle—any puzzle—they try to stay inside those dots. And the key to beating it,” Hillier adds with a smile, “is to go outside.”

The box wording can be traced to a 26 October 1969 newspaper column by preacher and self-help guru Norman Vincent Peale. Peale was enormously popular and influential, and his column would have been widely syndicated and read, and he is certainly responsible for much of the phrase’s popularity. Although, as with outside the dots, he doesn’t use the full phrasing of think outside the box:

There is one particular puzzle you may have seen. It’s a drawing of a box with some dots in it, and the idea is to connect all the dots by using only four lines. You can work and work on that puzzle, but the only way to solve it is to draw the lines to [sic] they connect outside the box. It’s simple, once you realize the principle behind it. But if you keep trying to solve it inside the box, you’ll never be able to master that particular puzzle.

That puzzle represents the way a lot of people think. They get caught up inside the box of their own lives. You’ve got to approach any problem objectively. Stand back and see it for exactly what it is. From a little distance, you can see it a lot more clearly. Try and get a different perspective, a fresh point of view. Step outside the box your problem has created within you and come at it from a different direction.

The full phrase think outside the box dates to a few years later and the September 1971 issue of the journal Data Management:

THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX

If you have kept your thinking process operating inside the lines and boxes, then you are normal and average, for that is the way your thinking has been programmed. Unfortunately, we have accepted thought process limitations that are artificial. They are man-made and do not exist in reality.

And as with the dots version, within a decade the phrase think outside the box could be used without explicit reference to the puzzle, assuming the readers would understand what was meant. From a syndicated medical column of 23 March 1978 by Dr. Robert Mendelsohn:

Some of my best teachers have been those who utilize the techniques of shock and surprise to rouse me out of conventional habits of thought, forcing me to question accepted teaching and stimulating me to “think outside the box.”

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Sources:

Anderson, John F. “Down to Earth.” Dallas Morning News (Texas), 30 October 1954, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

The Annual Register: A Review of Public Events at Home and Abroad for the Year 1887. London: Rivingtons, 1888, 168. Google Books.

Barnebey, Faith. “On the Draft: ‘Think Outside the Dots!’” Miami Herald (Florida), 6 July 1980, 1–E. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Challenge Brings Success.” Trenton Evening Times (New Jersey), 28 February 2010, D1, D3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Inventiveness, Motivation, Training Needs of Scientists.” Springfield Union (Massachusetts), 18 April 1963, 52. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Mendelsohn, Robert. “People’s Doctor.” Times-Picayune (New Orleans) (syndicated), 23 March 1978, 4–7. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Notaro, Michael R. “Management of Personnel: Organizational Patterns and Techniques.” Data Management, 9.9, September 1971, 77. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

O’Toole, Garson. “Antedating of ‘Outside the Box.’” ADS-L, 3 May 2010.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2021, s.v. box, n.2.

Peale, Norman Vincent. “Confident Living: Never Give Up.” Springfield Republican (Massachusetts), 26 October 1969, 23. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Tréguer, Pascal. “‘To Think Outside the Box’: Meaning and Origin.” Wordhistories.net . 28 April 2021.

Westell, Anthony. “Ottawa in Perspective: Canada Entering Big League in Research.” Ottawa Journal, 23 May 1970, 7. Newspapers.com.

“Women Accountants to Sponsor Seminar.” Dallas Morning News (Texas), 15 May 1964, 3–2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Notaro, Michael R. “Management of Personnel: Organizational Patterns and Techniques.” Data Management, 9.9, September 1971, 77. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Fair use of a copyrighted image to illustrate the topic under discussion.