Paint the Words Red Trivia Quiz

Answer: redox

The ox is a male bovine that is usually castrated and is often yoked with another ox when pulling heavy loads. The yoke is a beam that keeps the pair looking forward together and is associated with control over these powerful and often unruly animals.

Redox reactions are everywhere - they can be found in photosynthesis, geology, industrial processes, cell metabolism and more! A redox reaction involves both a reduction reaction and an oxidation reaction. For example, when hydrogen and fluoride react to create hydrogen fluoride, the hydrogen is oxidised (loses two electrons) and fluoride is reduced (gains two electrons). The ions then combine to create hydrogen fluoride, a dangerous and corrosive gas used in polymers and acids.

Topically, one of the mnemonics students use to remember redox terminology is 'RED CAT' and 'AN OX' meaning "reduction occurs at the cathode and the anode is for oxidation".

Answer: redye

As yokes were often mentioned in Biblical metaphor, the hymn "O Come, All Ye Faithful" also came to mind as an example of this plural pronoun. In the middle ages, it also became used in the second person singular in formal usage. Later, in the Early Modern English example of "Ye Olde Shoppe", the 'ye' was really a combination of the old English thorn letter - þ - which looked similar to a y in medieval typeset. Due to the similarity of these characters, people began to mistake the 'ye' in "Ye Olde Shoppe" with the more archaic pronoun.

Chemically, an organic colourant is considered a dye if it is soluble in water or an organic solvent, where a pigment would be insoluble in both of those types of liquid media. The dye is designed so that it has a stronger affinity for its substrate - e.g. cotton - than its liquid solute. When it comes to hair, dying and redying has been extremely popular in some countries. In the early 21st century, the hair colouring industry was a multi-billion pound international business, with a study from the University of Copenhagen in 2016 reporting that 75% of sampled women had used hair dye.

Answer: redraw

Raw material is also known as feedstock, unprocessed or basic material and examples include sugar, oil and stone. Its association with uncooked food is thought to predate its association with chafed or sore flesh - the former is dated to pre-1000 Middle English while the latter is associated with the late 14th century.

In computing, refresh rate refers to the ability of the monitor to redraw its display every second and is measured in hertz. In a standard monitor with 60hz, the screen will be redrawn 60 times a second with a gap of 16.67 milliseconds between each frame. Gamers often look for a high refresh rate and a low response rate for a fluid experience and a sharp image: the response rate refers to the time it takes in milliseconds for a pixel to be able to change from white to black fully.

Answer: redden

A den is an often concealed underground home that many wild animals could use - foxes, opossums, moles and skunks to name a few. A den in the UK can also be a structure that children have built to play in... but, my personal favourite is the den of iniquity, where people often get up to no good.

To blush is to redden; one can blush in the reflexive sense that they themselves are blushing - perhaps from embarrassment - or one could apply blush facially as in make-up. Where the Egyptians used red ochre, and the Romans red vermillion, safer and more mainstream versions were developed in the early 1900s when blush became industrialised.

Answer: redback

In many senses of the word, the rear can be the back end of something. The rear surface from the shoulders to the hips can be the back; the direction behind us can be back; events from the past may have happened way back; and players in many sports who play at the rear might be considered backs. Of course, back can have other meanings - I hope you'll back this quiz, for example! But not with a redback.

Speaking of which, the redback is a venomous Australian spider also known as the Australian black widow. It has a trademark red stripe on its abdomen and wraps any prey in its web with silk before biting them multiple times and dissolving their insides for consumption with specialised venom. Whilst they have no particular quarrel with humans, we'd do best to keep our distance as the larger female in particular can cause latrodectism - this illness includes symptoms such as extreme pain, sweating and nausea. Fortunately, as a Brit I'm potentially over ten thousand miles of distance away; unfortunately, some lactrodectus (widow spider) species have been exported to European locales including England, though sightings have been extremely rare.

Answer: redcoat

A coat is generically an outer layer: it can be an outer layer or varnish as in a glaze or veneer; an outer garment that provides warmth and that typically extends below the hips; an animal's outer layer of fur; or as a verb to provide an outer layer to something else.

If you've ever seen British soldiers in scarlet tunics wearing what appears to be a large microphone foam for a helmet, that coat was a modified version of the ones used in the Revolutionary War in the late 18th century and is the origin of the nickname. For example, "The redcoats are coming!" or "The British are coming!" were apocryphal quotes famously attributed to silversmith Paul Revere as he led his famous midnight ride to warn of the British invasion.

Answer: redwood

"American Gothic", completed in 1930, was one of Grant Wood's defining pieces of artwork and prominently features a farmer holding a pitchfork with his wife or daughter looking slightly cynically at him. The farmhouse in the background was based on Dibble House in the small Iowan town of Eldon and his sister Nan and dentist Dr. Byron McKeeby were models, having been in traditional clothes. Whilst the painting initially generated outrage at portraying the rural figures as stiff-faced and puritanical, another interpretation is that Wood wanted to portray an optimistic figure of the types of people who would be most likely to withstand the hardships of the Great Depression.

Elsewhere in America, the California redwood trees tower over us mere mortals; in 2018 the Hyperion tree measured a lofty 115.61 meters tall and was the tallest known tree at that time. In 2016, no other living tree had even exceeded the 100m mark. As their more frequently used name - coast redwood - suggests, they tend to grow on the Pacific coast and also stretch up into Oregon. Their thick fibrous bark can grow a foot deep and their chemical defenses such as tannins guard from insects and fungus. Whilst historically important for the lumber industry, a 2016 study that took place over seven years showed that these trees have an impressive ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere - not a magic bullet for climate change issues but well worth protecting nonetheless.

Answer: redware

The old English 'waru' for 'commodities' may also have been the same word as the Scots for 'ware' meaning 'cautiousness' - buyer beware indeed! Archaically the word was also used in the sense of being aware, or to be on one's guard. Ware is also a town in Hertfordshire near the county town of Hertford, named after the weirs or low head dams used to stymie the Viking invasion.

More generically, ware could refer to any kind of pottery, but we're obviously all about the red in this quiz. In redware this, unsurprisingly, refers to the terracotta-like colour in this pottery where the two main types were made between the 17th and 19th centuries. European redware was typically unglazed stoneware used for example in cups or mugs and which could be quite expensive in relative terms. In contrast, American redware was cheap pottery which was either unglazed with a natural red colour or glazed with red.

Answer: redshift

The main use of the shift key on a keyboard is to alternate between lower and uppercase characters - this is a holdover function that dates back to the old typewriters first made in the 19th century. On more modern keyboards, the shift key can also be used to execute a number of shortcuts, for example the highly irritating Sticky Keys accessibility function that was enabled if the shift key had been hit five times.

As red is the longest wavelength band of visible light, most light with a stretched or elongated wavelength would be closer to the red band of light. However, other forms of electromagnetic radiation can be redshifted too - visible light can for example be stretched out to radio waves. Whilst nearby objects can exhibit redshift due to the Doppler effect when a light source moves away from the observer, cosmologically the effect occurs with astronomical objects due to the expansion of space itself.

Answer: redbreast

Anatomically, the chest or breast is situated between the neck and abdomen and seats significant organs such as the heart and lungs. Also known as the thorax, this region is also associated with other mammals, birds and as one of the three multi-segmented divisions in insects and crustaceans. It could also be a treasure chest, but if you paint that red you just get... a red chest. Not good for much, alas.

The European robin - Erithacus rubecula - really has a distinctive orange breast but as the colour orange did not have an English name until the fruit was first imported it was called the robin redbreast instead. In Britain, these birds have generally been seen as friendly figures who would look for earthworms and other food sources after gardeners had dug up the local soil, and have even accepted feed from human hands. In contrast, European robins were hunted, and as such have been far warier of humans.