200 funny quiz team names for your next pub quiz

Your team name is the first impression you make at a quiz night. Get it right and you'll hear the host chuckle when they read it out. Get it wrong and, well, "Table 7" works fine too.

Below are 200 team names that actually work, sorted into categories so you can skip to the kind of thing your group would say out loud. Some are clever, some are stupid, and a fair few are stupidly clever. There's also a spinner at the top if you'd rather not read all 200 and would like the decision made for you.

The classics that always work

These are tried and tested. You've probably heard some of them before, but they're popular for a reason.

1. Quiz Khalifa
2. Quizteama Aguilera
3. The Quizard of Oz
4. Let's Get Quizzical
5. Agatha Quiztie
6. Quiz Me Baby One More Time
7. Quizzy Rascal
8. Quizzy McQuizface
9. Risky Quizness
10. Norfolk and Chance
11. Trivia Newton John
12. You're a Quizzard, Harry

That Norfolk one works best in the UK. It's a classic British double entendre that sounds innocent when you say it fast, which is exactly why it keeps working.

Puns on famous names

Celebrity name puns are quiz night gold. Just make sure the reference isn't too dated for your crowd.

13. Quentin Quarantino
14. Stephen Hawkings and Chips
15. E = MC Hammer
16. Universally Challenged
17. Les Quizerables
18. Tequila Mockingbird
19. The Wizard of Odds
20. I Am Smartacus
21. Whiskey Business
22. Han Solo and Friends (for teams of one)
23. Bill Murray's Golf Caddy
24. Victorious Secret
25. Cirque du So Lame
26. Schindler's Pissed
27. The Aristocats

Self-deprecating names

Nothing endears you to the room like admitting you're probably going to lose. These also take the sting out of a bad music round.

28. We Drink and We Don't Know Things
29. We Thought This Was Speed Dating
30. Our Drinking Team Has a Quiz Problem
31. I Thought This Was a Wine Tasting
32. Here for the Beer
33. Second Place Winners
34. Just Here So We Don't Get Fined
35. We Can't Even
36. Our Couch Was Busy
37. The Disappointments
38. Collective Noun for Losers
39. Participation Award Winners
40. We Peaked in Primary School
41. Last Place Legends
42. The Wrong Answers
43. Better at Drinking

Modern life gripes

Shared misery is funny. These land with any room full of adults, and unlike properly topical names they don't expire in a fortnight.

44. Working From Pub
45. AI Generated Team Name
46. ChatGBT (Get a Beer Team)
47. The Cost of Living Crisis
48. Waiting for a GP Appointment
49. Interest Rate Anxiety
50. Rail Replacement Service

If you want something genuinely topical, build it from this week's news rather than a list. Our weekly question bank is a decent shortcut for spotting what everyone's been talking about.

Food and drink puns

Perfect for pub settings. Everyone can appreciate a good food pun, especially three pints in.

51. Quiz on My Face
52. Nacho Average Team
53. Cereal Killers
54. Sofa King Smart
55. Beer Pressure
56. The Wine Club
57. Pour Decisions
58. Brew Tang Clan
59. Ale Caesar
60. Game of Scones
61. Gin and Titonic
62. The Lager Rhythms
63. Pint of No Return
64. Vodka You Think You're Playing At
65. Tequila Sunrise (and Fall)

Film and TV references

Pop culture references work well because most people get them instantly. Pick something old enough that everyone's seen it.

66. The Simpsons Already Did It
67. We're Not Supposed to Talk About It
68. Red Wedding Crashers
69. The One Where We Win
70. Winter Is Coming (Last Place)
71. Netflix and Quiz
72. May the Scores Be With You
73. Inglourious Quizzards
74. Game of Phones
75. Breaking Badly
76. House of Quiz
77. Peaky Brainders
78. You Know Nothing, Quiz Team
79. That's So Raven

Music references

These hit different when the music round starts and you still can't name the song.

80. Quiz Springsteen
81. Backstreet Buoys
82. Mick Swagger
83. Fleetwood Crack
84. Red Hot Quiz Peppers
85. Testing, Testing, One Two Three
86. Earth, Wind and Quiz
87. Guns N' Posers
88. 50 Cent's Half Dollar
89. Billie Eye Lash
90. The Rolling Stoned
91. Abba Dab Doo
92. Quizney Houston
93. Men at Quiz
94. The Bee Gee Willickers

Pair one of these with a decent playlist and you're most of the way to a good night. We've got music round ideas if you're the one running it.

Nerdy and academic

For the teams who want everyone to know they went to university.

95. Periodic Table Dancers
96. Quiz Pro Quo
97. Plato's Cave
98. Dunning-Kruger All Stars
99. Schrödinger's Answers
100. The Standard Deviants
101. Pavlov's Dogs
102. The Null Hypothesis
103. Ctrl Alt Defeat
104. 404 Error: Team Name Not Found
105. The Algorithm
106. Correlation Not Causation
107. Thought Experiment
108. Occam's Razor Sharp
109. The Boolean Brothers

If you appreciate these, you'll probably enjoy XKCD or Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for more of the same humour.

Sports references

Warning: these might attract heckles from rival fans. That's half the fun.

110. Goal Diggers
111. The Benchwarmers
112. Not the England Squad
113. Fantasy Football Survivors
114. It's Coming Home (It's Not)
115. Multiple Scoresers
116. The Fixtures
117. Grassroots FC
118. Pitch Please
119. Red Card Collective
120. The Underdogs
121. Keeper's Union
122. Offside Story
123. Sweaty Palms FC

Deliberately dumb

Sometimes the best approach is pure silliness. These names don't try to be clever and that's exactly the point.

124. Team Name
125. I Don't Know
126. We're With Stupid
127. The Other Team
128. Table Number (insert your table number)
129. First Time Here
130. Just Google It
131. The Answer Is C
132. Free Beer
133. Definitely Not Cheating
134. Fake ID
135. Wrong Quiz
136. Lost
137. Help

"I Don't Know" is the one to watch. A host reading the scores out gets about four rounds in before realising they've been answering a question nobody asked.

Cheeky and a bit rude

Every quiz has a line and it moves depending on the pub. These lean saucy rather than offensive, which means they still get read out instead of quietly skipped.

138. Master Debaters
139. Betty Swollocks
140. Smarty Pints
141. Hung, Drawn and Quizzed
142. Fifty Shades of Grey Matter
143. Dirty Harry Potters
144. Blood, Sweat and Beers
145. The Mild Bunch
146. Beauty and the Yeast
147. Sex, Drugs and Sausage Rolls
148. Quiz in My Pants
149. Nocturnal Admissions
150. Carry On Quizzing

One rule of thumb: if the host would have to apologise after reading it, pick something else. Hosts remember, and they're the ones marking your answer sheet.

Christmas, Halloween and other seasonal options

Seasonal names only work for a few weeks a year, which is precisely why nobody's bored of them yet.

151. Sleigh My Name, Sleigh My Name
152. Fleece Navidad
153. Quizmas Miracle
154. Elf Esteem Issues
155. Yule Be Sorry
156. Tinsel Tough
157. Resting Grinch Face
158. Snow Business
159. The Three Wise Guys
160. Mistletoe and Whine
161. Hark the Herald Angels Quiz
162. Hocus Pocus, We've Lost Focus
163. The Walking Deadweight
164. Silence of the Lambrinis
165. Trick or Treat Yourself

Running the thing rather than playing it? Our Christmas quiz questions and Christmas round ideas will save you an evening.

Work and office quiz nights

The tricky category. Funny enough to be worth saying, safe enough that your manager is still on your team afterwards.

166. Out of Office
167. This Meeting Could Have Been an Email
168. Reply All Disasters
169. The Away Team
170. Spreadsheet Warriors
171. Peak Synergy
172. HR Nightmare
173. Team Building Exercise
174. Not Paid Enough for This
175. The Quarterly Review
176. Lacking a Quorum
177. Circling Back

For teams of two

Smaller teams need names that acknowledge the odds are against them.

178. Two Heads, One Brain Cell
179. Two's Company
180. Double Trouble
181. The Pair Necessities
182. Dumb and Dumber
183. Night Out for the Couple
184. The Lovebirds
185. Better Half and Worse Half
186. Date Night Got Weird
187. We Were Promised Dinner

Clever ones you haven't seen a hundred times

The list above covers the names that get used every week. These get used less, which makes them land harder.

188. Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthing ta Quiz Wit
189. Paxman's Apprentices
190. Sherlock Combs
191. Fingers on Buzzers
192. The Scrambled Eggheads
193. Trivial Pursuits
194. Bletchley Larks
195. Google's Worst Nightmare
196. Mensa Rejects
197. Last Orders
198. The Answer Is Always Beyoncé
199. Three Blind Mice and a Bloke Called Steve
200. Quizzes for the Memories

Paxman's Apprentices only works for a crowd that watched University Challenge, which, if you're in a British pub on a weeknight, is most of them.

How to pick one that works

The best team names usually come from an inside joke or something that happened on the way to the pub. Don't overthink it. A mediocre name that means something to your group beats a technically perfect one that feels like it came off a list.

If you are picking off a list, four things separate the names that land from the ones that don't:

• Say it out loud first. Plenty of puns only work on paper. "Quizteama Aguilera" is fine. Anything needing a run-up isn't.
• Keep it short. The host reads your name out five or six times across a night. Every extra word is a word they'll start skipping.
• Don't make them explain it. If the joke needs context, the room has moved on before the host finishes.
• Watch the shelf life. Topical names are brilliant for about three weeks. "Pokémon Go to the Polls" had a moment. That moment was 2016.

One more thing worth knowing: hosts notice teams who put effort in, and a few of them quietly hand out a point for the best name. It happens more than you'd think, especially at smaller quizzes where the host is making their own fun too.

Running the quiz rather than playing it?

If you're the one writing the questions, you can build a quiz for free with our quiz creator, including the team sign-up bit where everyone types in whichever of these they've gone for. We've also written up how to run a great pub quiz and a round-up of the 10 team names that work best if you want the short version of this page.

Good luck, and may your team name be the second-best thing about your night (after your score, obviously).