Before the trivia subculture became widespread, via radio and TV quiz shows and books, the term commonly referred to bits of information to which most adults in the culture had at one time been exposed, via standard education or via popular culture. In time the term came also to comprise more obscure and arcane bits of knowledge. In 1974, a former Sacramento air traffic controller named Fred L. Worth published The Trivia Encyclopedia, which he followed in 1977 with The Complete Unabridged Super Trivia Encyclopedia, and in 1981 with Super Trivia, vol. II. The popularity of these books (one appears as a prop in movie Almost Famous) laid the groundwork for the first edition of Trivial Pursuit in the early 1980s.
The enormous success of this game led, in the United States, to the re-launch of Jeopardy!, reviving a quiz show genre that had been dormant since the scandal of the 1950s. In the 1990s, ABC had a surprise hit with Who Wants to be a Millionaire, an import of a successful British quiz format which launched another wave of interest in trivia. In the UK, the quiz format has enjoyed continuous success since the 1950s, untouched by the scandals that dogged the American format.
In addition to the mass media trivia, there have also been two entrenched trivia subcultures. One is the Pub quiz phenomenon, which is especially prevalent in Great Britain and in select US cities, particularly in pubs that serve a large Irish-American community. (The US pub quiz scene is crimped by the popularity of NTN, a satellite-based game.)
The other subculture is the quiz bowl format found in high schools and universities in the US; the Canadian equivalent is competition geared toward Reach for the Top, among high schools, whereas Canadian universities are beginning to participate in US quiz bowl leagues.
The first known usage of the word "trivial" in Modern English is from 1589; it was used with a sense identical to that of triviālis. Shortly after that trivial is recorded in the sense most familiar to us: "of little importance or significance." Gradually, the word trivia came to be applied for any information that is of fleeting importance and of general interest.
Another, slightly different use of trivium may be more directly related to the modern meaning of the word, the earliest known use of which in English is in a work from 1432-1450. This work mentions the "arte trivialle", a reference to the three liberal arts that made up the first three subjects taught in medieval universities, namely Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic. The remaining four liberal arts of the Quadrivium, namely Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy, were more challenging. Hence, trivial in this sense would have been "of interest only to an undergraduate".
The first known usage of the word trivial in Modern English is from 1589; it was used with a sense identical to that of triviālis. Shortly after that trivial is recorded in the sense most familiar to us: "of little importance or significance."