Oregon Road Signs and Their Meanings

Oregon DMV opens its online knowledge test with a warning rather than an instruction. If you already hold a current and valid driver license or motorcycle endorsement, the page says, you are likely not required to take it at all — and "if you take this test out of curiosity, your driving privileges may be suspended if you fail this test." That is a strong argument for practicing somewhere that cannot touch your record. The exam it is warning you away from is, unusually, published in full: the Oregon Driver Manual states that the Class C knowledge test "has 35 multiple-choice questions" and that "you must answer 28 questions correctly to receive a passing score," and it names road signs first in the list of what those questions cover.

Twenty-eight out of thirty-five is the only bar Oregon sets. No portion of it is reserved for signs, and there is no separate signs examination standing beside it, so a sign question costs exactly what any other question costs. Signs are examined a second time, though, on the other test. The manual's description of the behind-the-wheel test says you will demonstrate "your driving skills and knowledge of traffic rules, highway signs, and signals" — meaning the examiner in the passenger seat is entitled to judge whether you read the roadway correctly, not merely whether you handled the car. Studying the chart below is therefore not only preparation for a multiple-choice screen; it is preparation for the other test, the one where nobody offers you four options.

Oregon is the only state on this site whose sign questions cite a page. Every published question in this bank names one — "Warning Signs, p. 10", "Motorist Service Signs, p. 14" — where no other state's citations do. The numbers hold up against the book. The manual's contents place Signs at page 7 and Traffic Signals at page 15, so the sign material runs from page 7 through page 14, and twelve of the fourteen citations here fall inside that span. The precision is finer than the subsection heading, too. Three questions ask about a NO TURN ON RED sign, an HOV 2+ lane and a KEEP RIGHT sign, and all three are cited to page 9 rather than to page 8, where the Regulatory Signs – Other heading opens — page 9 being where those particular three signs are described.

Two questions in this set are cited outside the manual's sign pages, and both land where Oregon actually files the material: the five-sided yellow sign that opens a school zone sits with the school-zone rules much later in the book, and the orange-and-red triangle carried by slow-moving farm equipment sits with the section on other vehicles. Everything else comes from the sign pages, including one entry that is distinctly Oregon's. A Safety Corridor is a designated stretch of highway with more fatal and serious injury collisions than the statewide average; the manual says the signs marking one may include diamond-shaped flags, and what it asks of you inside one is your headlights — not a speed, not a maneuver, just lights on.

14 published Oregon road-sign questions, each with an explanation and a citation to the handbook section it came from.

Content reviewed against official driver handbooks · August 12, 2026