The trivia (singular trivium) are three lower Artes Liberales, i.e. grammar, logic and rhetoric.

These
were the topics of basic education, foundational to the quadrivia of higher education, and hence the
material of basic education and an important building block for all undergraduates. The word trivia was
also used to describe a place where three roads met in Ancient Rome. While the term is now obsolescent,
in ancient times, it was appropriated to mean something very new.
In the 1960s, nostalgic college students and others began to informally trade questions and answers about
the popular culture of their youth. The first known documented labeling of this casual parlor game as
"Trivia" was in a Columbia Daily Spectator column published on February 5, 1965.[1] The authors, Ed
Goodgold and Dan Carlinsky, then started the first organized trivia contests, described below. Since the
1960s, the plural trivia in particular has widened to include nonessential, specifically detailed knowledge
on topics of popular culture. The expression has also come to suggest information of the kind useful
almost exclusively for answering quiz questions, hence the brand name Trivial Pursuit (1982).
The Latin neuter noun trivium (plural trivia) is from tri- "triple" and via "way", meaning "a place where
three ways meet". The pertaining adjective is trivilis. The adjective trivialwas adopted in Early Modern
English, while the noun trivium only appears in learned usage from the 19th century, in reference to
the Artes Liberales and the plural trivia in the sense of "trivialities, trifles" only in the 20th century.
The Latin adjective trivilis in Classical Latin besides its literal meaning could have the meaning
"appropriate to the street corner, commonplace, vulgar." In late Latin, it could also simply mean "triple".
In medieval Latin, it came to refer to the lower division of the Artes Liberales, namely grammar, rhetoric,
and logic. (The other four Liberal Arts were thequadrivium, namely arithmetic, geometry, music,
and astronomy, which were more challenging.) Hence, trivial in this sense would have meant "of interest
only to an undergraduate".
The adjective trivial introduced into English in the 15th to 16th century was influenced by all three
meanings of the Latin adjective:

A 15th century English translation of Ranulf Higdon mentions the arte trivialle, referring to
the trivium of the Liberal Arts.[2]

the same work also calls a triuialle distinccion a threefold division. This is due to an application
of the term by Arnobius, and was never common either in Latin or English. [3]

the meaning "trite, commonplace, unimportant, slight" occurs from the late 16th century, notably
in the works of Shakespeare.[4]

Trivia was used as a title by Logan Pearsall Smith in 1902,[5] followed by More Trivia and All Trivia in
1921 and 1933, respectively, collections of short "moral pieces" or aphorisms. Book II of the 1902
publication is headed with a purported quote from "Gay's Trivia, or New Art of Walking Streets of
London.",

"Thou, Trivia, goddess, aid my song: Through spacious streets conduct thy bard along."