trivia (n.)

Trivia are small facts of no great weight. The word is the Latin plural of trivium, the place where three roads meet.¹

A crossroads is a public place. Anyone might be standing in it, and what was said there was what anyone might say, so trivialis came to mean public, and then ordinary, and then of no particular importance.¹

The medieval university used the same word for the first three of the seven liberal arts — grammar, rhetoric and logic — the ones taken before the other four. To be trivial was to belong to that first stage.¹²

The sense the word has now, facts asked and answered for their own sake, is from the 1960s and American campuses.¹

He is unbeatable at trivia.