A QUITE INTERESTING BOOK

1,227 QI FACTS

TO BLOW YOUR SOCKS OFF

Compiled by
John Lloyd, John Mitchinson
& James Harkin

with the QI Elves
Anne Miller, Andy Murray & Alex Bell

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Epigraph

1,227 Facts

Tasting Notes

Index

About the Authors

By the Same Authors

Copyright

Introduction

I am no poet but, if you think for yourselves as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your mind.

MICHAEL FARADAY (1791–1867)

Michael Faraday was one of the greatest scientists in history and the greatest experimentalist of them all. The son of a village blacksmith from a desolate part of Cumbria, he left school at 14 with only the most rudimentary education, and taught himself everything he knew by reading the books that passed through his hands during his seven-year apprenticeship to a London bookbinder.

At QI, we think a great deal of Michael Faraday, and we’re not the only ones. Albert Einstein kept a picture of him on his study wall, alongside Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell.

Like Faraday, we read a lot of books – on any and every conceivable subject, and the more madly random the better.

None of us claim to have an ounce of Faraday’s genius, but all three of us, despite the fact that we each went to university (43, 31 and 16 years ago respectively), count ourselves as essentially self-educated.

We have achieved this together over the last ten years by applying the QI Research Method, which can be expressed in a single line. It is to ‘read all of anything (even the footnotes) but only write down what you, personally, find interesting’. This not only reduces, by several orders of magnitude, the essentially infinite amount of available information in the universe, but it also has the delightful side effect that we really do ‘learn something new every day’.

For instance, until 20 minutes ago, when we started writing this introduction, none of us knew that Michael Faraday (as in so many other ways) was more than 150 years ahead of us. For he did exactly the same thing as we now do: he read every book he came across, but only noted down what he found ‘singular or clever’.

Core QI research always begins like this, in nuggets. Each bit is then added to our database, expressed in the clearest and sparest form that we can manage.

This simple way of distilling knowledge leaves behind a rich residue of astonishment and delight, a small selection of which is before you.

Much of what we find lays bare, surprisingly often, what is not known, rather than what is known. Such information (or lack of it) can be returned to again and again without ever becoming dull. It bears thinking about, often. When Newton was asked how he had discovered the universal law of gravitation, he replied, ‘By thinking on it continually.’ Or, as another of our heroes, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, put it: ‘Do not become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin.’

So here, in bite-sized pieces, nestling among the known and the numbered, are the mysteries of the enormous and the minuscule; of human comedy and tragedy; of heat, light, speed, life, art and thought.

As Faraday urged his students, we also try to think for ourselves. But more uncannily than that, coaxing these 1,227 items into an order that felt comfortable and right has had the strange result that they have indeed come to form a kind of poem in the mind.

We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we have enjoyed putting them together.

And, if you solve any of the mysteries, let us know.

JOHN LLOYD, JOHN MITCHINSON & JAMES HARKIN

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions,
but they are not entitled
to their own facts.

DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN (1927–2003)

Asteroid

1,227

is called Geranium.

The ozone layer

smells faintly of

geraniums.

The centre of the galaxy

tastes like

raspberries.

The universe

is shaped

like a vuvuzela.

Light travels

18 million times faster

than rain.

The Queen is the legal owner

of one-sixth of the

Earth’s land surface.

The name of the first human being

in Norse mythology

is Ask.

Everybody expected

the Spanish Inquisition –

they were legally obliged

to give 30 days’ notice.

Octopuses

have three hearts.

Kangaroos

have three vaginas.

Three of Fidel Castro’s sons,

Alexis, Alexander and Alejandro,

are named

after Alexander the Great.

The opening lines of

Jerome K. Jerome’s

Three Men In A Boat are:

‘There were four of us.’

40% of the human race

did not survive

beyond its 1st birthday.

One in ten European babies

is conceived

in an IKEA bed.

The human heart

pumps enough blood in a lifetime

to fill three supertankers.

The word ‘time’

is the most commonly used

noun in English.

10% of all the photographs

in the world

were taken in the last 12 months.

Between 1838 and 1960,

more than half the photos taken

were of babies.

The words written on

Twitter every day

would fill

a 10-million-page book.

In 2008, a man in Ohio

was arrested for

having sex with a picnic table.

The average person walks

the equivalent of three times

around the world

in a lifetime.

The world’s population spends

500,000 hours a day

typing Internet security codes.

The first book ever printed in Oxford

had a misprint on the first page:

they got the date wrong.

For 100 years, the flag of the

tropical Turks and Caicos Islands

in the West Indies

mistakenly featured an igloo.

One third of Russians

believe that

the Sun revolves around the Earth.

46% of American adults

believe that the world

is less than 10,000 years old.

46% of American adults

can’t read well enough to understand

the label on their prescription medicine.

More than 50% of NASA employees

are dyslexic,

hired for their superior problem-solving

and spatial-awareness skills.

Beyoncé Knowles

is an 8th cousin, four times removed,

of Gustav Mahler.

Shostakovich

wrote his 8th Symphony

in a henhouse.

Argentina

is the 8th-largest country

with the 8th-largest Jewish population.

8th January 1835

is the only day in history

that the USA had no national debt.

Italy’s biggest business is the Mafia.

It turns over $178 billion a year

and accounts for 7% of GDP.

George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein

had their shoes hand-made

by the same Italian cobbler.

The designer of Saddam’s bunker

was the grandson of the woman

who built Hitler’s bunker.

Churchill’s secret bunker

was in Neasden.

It was so horrible

he only went there once.

In his first year at Harrow,

Winston Churchill was bottom

of the whole school.

The Irish poet Brendan Behan

became an alcoholic

at the age of eight.

Leonardo da Vinci

worked on the Mona Lisa for 15 years.

By the time he died in 1519,

he still didn’t consider it finished.

When the Mona Lisa was stolen

from the Louvre in 1911,

one of the suspects was Picasso.

Most diamonds are

at least 3 billion years old.

There are enough

diamonds in existence

to give everyone on the planet

a cupful.

A burning candle creates

1.5 million tiny diamonds

per second.

Under extreme high pressure,

diamonds can be made

from peanut butter.

The US tax code

is four times as long

as the complete works of Shakespeare.

Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh

and King Charles I

all had pierced ears.

An ‘earworm’ is a song

that gets stuck in your head.

Over 100 billion neutrinos

pass unnoticed through your head

every second.

IKEA

is the world’s 3rd-largest user

of wood and sells 2 billion

Swedish meatballs a year.

In Afghanistan and Iraq

it takes 250,000 bullets

(three tons of ammunition)

to kill each insurgent.

More Falklands veterans

have committed suicide

since the war

than were killed during it.

A language

dies every 14 days.

The world’s largest pearl

weighs 14 pounds.

On average, American doctors

interrupt their patients

within 14 seconds.

There are over 14 billion light bulbs

in the world

but fewer than 14 million Jews.

People earning over £14,000 a year

are the richest 4%

on the planet.

There are eight times as many atoms

in a teaspoonful of water

as there are teaspoonfuls of water

in the Atlantic.

There are more living organisms

in a teaspoonful of soil

than there are people on Earth,

and a billion times more in a tonne

than there are stars

in the Milky Way.

Charles Darwin

calculated that English soil contained

50,000 worms an acre.

In 1999, Darlington FC acquired

50,000 worms to irrigate their

waterlogged pitch.

They all drowned.

Three and a half Olympic swimming pools

could hold all the gold

ever mined in the world.

In 2011, Birds Eye sold

225 billion frozen peas:

enough to fill

40 Olympic swimming pools.

If all the Birds Eye waffles

sold in a year were stacked up,

they would be 474 times higher

than Mount Everest.

Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb

Everest, was a professional beekeeper.

When filling in forms,

he always gave his occupation as

‘apiarist’.

The 10,000 trillion ants in the world

weigh about the same as

all the human beings.

If the 5 trillion spiders

in the Netherlands took to eating

humans rather than insects,

they’d consume all 16.7 million

Dutch people in just three days.

Alfred Kinsey, author of

Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948),

had a collection of 5 million wasps

and could insert a toothbrush

into his penis, bristle-end first.

Biologically speaking,

‘bugs’ are insects that suck.

Biologists cannot agree

on definitions for the words

‘species’, ‘organism’ or ‘life’.

Behavioural biologists

do not agree on what constitutes

‘behaviour’.

Psychologists

cannot agree on

what ‘personality’ means.

Anthropologists cannot agree

on the meaning of the word

‘culture’

or on the meaning of the word

‘meaning’.

Abulia n.

The inability

to make decisions.

Astasia n.

The inability

to stand up.

Aprosexia n.

The inability

to concentrate on anything.

Apodysophilia n.

A feverish desire

to rip one’s clothes off.

If all the Lego bricks ever manufactured

were clipped on top of each other,

they would make a tower ten times as high

as the distance to the Moon.

Liechtenstein,

the world’s 6th-smallest country,

is the world’s largest exporter of

false teeth.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries,

having all your teeth removed

and replaced with false ones

was a popular

21st-birthday present.

The road signs

of the Austrian village of Fucking

are set in concrete

to deter thieves.

London,

with a population of over 8,000,000,

is not a city,

though the City of London,

with a population of about 7,000,

is.

According to the Forestry Commission,

London is

‘the largest urban forest in the world’.

In 1894, The Times estimated that by 1950

London would be nine feet deep

in horse manure.

The Roman name for Paris was

Lutetia,

which translates into English

as ‘Slough’.

In 1811, nearly a quarter

of all the women in Britain

were named Mary.

In 1881, there were only six men

in Britain

called Derek.

Only 4 Clives, 13 Trevors and 15 Keiths

were born in the UK

in 2011.

Naughty racehorse names

that managed to escape

the Jockey Club censor include

Hoof Hearted, Peony’s Envy,

Wear The Fox Hat and Sofa Can Fast.

In 2012,

the Advertising Standards Authority

ordered a Northampton-based

furniture store to stop

advertising its prices

as ‘Sofa King Low’.

Caterpillars make no noises

other than chewing –

though Phengaris rebeli

strums its bottom like a guitar.

Every year,

Peruvians eat more than

60 million guinea pigs.

In Switzerland,

it is illegal to keep

just one guinea pig.

98% of British homes

have carpeted floors.

In Italy, only 2% do.

In Japan only 2% of adoptions are

of children;

98% are adult males

aged 25 to 30.

It’s unsafe for travellers to rely on

‘St Christopher’ any more:

he lost his sainthood

in 1969.

10% of US electricity

is made from

dismantled Soviet atomic bombs.

Until 1913, children in America

could legally be sent

by parcel post.

There are 5.9 calories

in the glue of a

British postage stamp.

All the batteries on Earth store

just ten minutes

of the world’s electricity needs.

Ancient Greek democracy

lasted for only

185 years.

The ancient Greeks

had no word for religion.

China

is the world’s largest supplier of Bibles:

one factory in Nanjing prints

a million a month.

The dialling code for Russia

is 007.

Collectively speaking, humans have spent

longer playing World of Warcraft

than they have existed

as a species separate from chimpanzees

(5.93 million years).

Charette n.

An intense flurry of activity

to finish something

by a deadline.

Muntin n.

The thin strip of wood or metal that

divides the panes of glass in a window.

Nikhedonia (n.)

The pleasurable anticipation of success

before any actual work

has been done.

Smout (n.)

A small, unimportant

Scottish person.

John Cleese’s father’s surname

was Cheese.

Cleese grew up ten miles from Cheddar

and his best friend at school

was called Barney Butter.

Digestive biscuits

have no particular digestive qualities.

In the USA it is illegal to sell them

under that name.

In 2010, the BBC spent

nearly £230,000 on tea,

but only £2,000 on biscuits.

Caffeine is made of

carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen:

the same as cocaine, thalidomide,

nylon, TNT and heroin.

The same man

invented heroin and aspirin

in the same year:

Felix Hoffman, 1897.

Heroin

was originally marketed

as cough medicine.

Worldwide sales of cocaine

earn more than

Microsoft, McDonald’s and Kellogg’s

combined.

More than 7,000 Americans die each year

and 1,500,000 are injured

as a result of doctors’

bad handwriting.

Fewer than 5%

of blind or visually impaired people

in the UK

can read Braille.

Attempting to swim the Channel

from France has been illegal

for 19 years.

The water-flow of the Ganges

is a state secret in India.

In 2012, Apple Inc.

had more cash

in the bank

than the US government.

In 2012, 20% of the world’s

top 20 snooker players

were colour-blind.

If you scaled a snooker ball up to

the size of the Earth,

it would have mountains

three times higher

than anything on the planet.

In 1903, its first year of trading,

Gillette sold just

168 razor blades.

The first advertising jingles

were written down in newspapers;

readers were expected

to sing them themselves.

There are more than three times

as many PR people in America

as there are journalists.

The Nazis made it illegal

on pain of death

for apes to give

the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute.

All but one of the ravens

at the Tower of London

died from stress during the Blitz.

British spies

stopped using semen as invisible ink

because it began to smell

if it wasn’t fresh.

Because Tonto means ‘stupid’ in Spanish,

when The Lone Ranger was shown in

Latin America, he was called Toro, ‘bull’.

Florence Green,

the last veteran of the First World War,

died in February 2012. Asked what it was

like to be 110, she replied,

‘Not much different to being 109.’

On her 120th birthday,

Jeanne Calment (1875–1997)

the oldest person ever recorded,

said, ‘I only have one wrinkle and

I’m sitting on it.’

The UK retail industry

makes £250 million a year

from gift cards that no one redeems.

In the 12th century,

the Danish army consisted of seven men.

In the 17th century,

the salary of the Governor of Barbados

was paid in sugar.

In the 18th century,

the French navy buried their dead

in the ship’s hold.

In the 19th century,

tobacco was used for ‘rectal inflation’:

blowing smoke up the anus

to resuscitate the drowned.

Cardiff

has more hours of sunlight

than Milan.

Glasgow

is twinned with

Nuremberg, Bethlehem and Havana.

Toasters

were banned in Havana

until 2008.

The Dyslexia Research Centre

is in Reading.

The technology behind smartphones

relies on up to

250,000 separate patents.

The human brain

takes in 11 million bits of

information every second,

but is only aware of 40.

The water in a blue whale’s mouth

weighs as much as its entire body.

The ancient Romans

discovered parrots could speak and

taught them to say ‘Hail Caesar’.

When they got bored with this,

they took to eating them instead.

The United States of America

maintains a military presence in

148 of the 192 United Nations countries.

On average, every square mile

of sea on the planet

contains 46,000 pieces of rubbish.

In 1251, Henry III was given

a polar bear by the king of Norway.

He kept it in the Tower of London,

on a long chain so that it could

swim in the Thames.

The tadpoles of the South American

paradoxical frog

are larger than the frog itself.

Historical Catholic clergy include:

Bishop Boil, Bishop Boom,

Bishop Broccoli, Bishop Bolognese,

Bishop Busti, Bishop Butt

and Bishop Bishop.

Kuku kaki kakak kakak ku kayak kuku kaki

kakek kakek ku

is an Indonesian tongue-twister meaning

‘My sister’s toenails

look like my grandfather’s’.

In the 2009 Formula One season,

12% of Grand Prix drivers

were called Sebastian.

People in Victorian Britain

who couldn’t afford chimney sweeps

dropped live geese

down their chimneys instead.

You are three times more likely

to die in a plane crash

than you are to be eaten

by a mountain lion.

Gerbils can smell adrenaline

and are installed in airport security areas

to detect terrorists.

If you drilled a tunnel

straight through the Earth and jumped in,

it would take you exactly

42 minutes and 12 seconds

to get to the other side.

A medium-sized cumulus cloud

weighs about the same

as 80 elephants.

Fred Baur (1918–2002),

the designer of the Pringles can,

had his ashes buried in one.

Fred is Swedish for ‘peace’.

Nobles present at the 18th-century

battle of Bravalla between

Sweden and Denmark included

Hothbrodd the Furious,

Thorulf the Thick, Birvil the Pale,

Roldar Toe-Joint, Vati the Doubter,

Od the Englishman, Alf the Proud and

Frosti Bowl.

The Queen of England

is related to

Vlad the Impaler.

When customers visited

the first supermarkets in the UK,

they were afraid to pick up

goods from the shelves

in case they were told off.

Women buy 80%

of everything

that is for sale.

Between 1928 and 1948,

12 Olympic medals were awarded

for Town Planning.

On a clear, moonless night

the human eye can detect

a match being struck

50 miles away.

In the US between 1983 and 2000,

there were 568 plane crashes.

51,207 of the 53,487

people aboard

got out alive:

a survival rate of 96%.

Harry Houdini could

pick up pins with his eyelashes

and thread a needle

with his toes.

The Sami people of northern Finland use

a measure called Poronkusema:

the distance a reindeer can walk

before needing to urinate.

The Inca measurement of time

was based on

how long it took to boil a potato.

Potatoes were illegal in France

between 1748 and 1772.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)

liked to eat fruit while

it was still attached to the tree.

Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree,

the great Victorian actor-manager, once

hailed a taxi and got in. Absorbed in his

work, he sat silently reading in the back.

When the cabbie eventually asked,

‘Where to, guv?’ Sir Herbert spluttered,

‘Do you really think I would give

my address to the likes of you?’

On average, most people

have fewer friends

than their friends have.

This is known as the ‘friendship paradox’.

Blissom vb

To bleat with sexual desire.

Eye-servant n.

One who only works

when the boss is watching.

Hemipygic adj.

Having only one buttock;

half-arsed.

Marmalise vb

To give someone

a thrashing.

The modern world’s

first international sporting fixture

was a cricket match played in 1844

between Canada and the USA.

Canada won by 23 runs.

Baseball – the name and the game – was

invented in England in the 1750s.

Baseball legend Babe Ruth

always wore a cabbage leaf under his cap

to keep his head cool. In South Korea,

this is considered unsporting,

unless the player has a doctor’s note.

‘Soccer’ is not an Americanism.

It’s short for ‘Association Football’

and was popularised by

Charles Wreford-Brown, captain

of the English national team 1894–5.

James Naismith, a Canadian,

invented basketball in Massachusetts

in 1891. It was 21 years

before it occurred to anyone

to cut a hole in the bottom of the basket.

Captain John Smith

of Pocahontas fame

was the first man

to use the word

‘awning’.

Aerosmith have made more money

from Guitar Hero

than from any of their albums.

When Matt Smith became

the 11th Doctor Who in 2010,

UK bow-tie sales doubled in a month.

98% of the 7 billion billion billion

atoms in the human body

are replaced every year.

Mongolia’s largest airport

is named after Genghis Khan.

He had over 500 wives

and a vast number of children:

1 in 10 people in Central Asia today

are his direct descendants.

Anophthalmus hitleri is a blind beetle found

only in five caves in Slovenia.

Named after Hitler in 1933,

it is now endangered due to

collectors of Nazi memorabilia.

Hitler’s home phone number

was listed in Who’s Who until 1945.

It was Berlin 11 6191.

At least 99%

of all the species that ever existed

have left no trace in the fossil record.

No scientific experiment

has ever been done

(or could be done)

to prove that time exists.

If you could fold

a piece of paper 51 times,

its thickness would exceed

the distance from here to the Sun.

Charles Blondin crossed Niagara Falls

several times on a 1,000-foot tightrope:

blindfolded, in a sack, on stilts,

carrying a man on his back

and cooking an omelette in the middle.

Michael J. Fox’s

middle name is

Andrew.

Emile Heskey’s

middle name is

Ivanhoe.

David Frost’s

middle name is

Paradine.

Richard Gere’s

middle name is

Tiffany.

1 in 50 Americans

executed for murder

had the middle name ‘Wayne’.

1 in 50 Scots

are heroin addicts.

1 in 50 Americans

claim to have been abducted

by aliens.

1 in 50 words

in the lyrics of the winning entries of

the Eurovision Song Contest

is ‘love’.

More people go to church

on Sunday in China

than in the whole of Europe.

The lead singer of Iron Maiden

has a day job as a

Boeing 757 pilot.

A greetings card

that can play ‘Happy Birthday’

has more computing power

than existed in the whole world in 1950.

You are 14% more likely to die

on your birthday

than any other day.

Oranges and lemons smell different

due to chemically identical molecules

that are mirror images of each other.

An orange is really

just a left-handed lemon.

Moon dust

smells like gunpowder.

A typical microwave oven

uses more electricity

keeping its digital clock on standby

than it does heating food.

As it grows,

sweetcorn makes a squeaking noise

like two balloons

rubbing against each other.

Emissions from car exhausts

are responsible for

more deaths every year

than road accidents.

You can legally buy cannabis

in the US, but only as birdseed:

the feathers of birds that eat it

acquire a particularly

glossy sheen.

Fidel Castro

estimated that he saved

ten working days a year

by not bothering to shave.

Wild Bill Hickok’s brother Lorenzo

was nicknamed

‘Tame Bill Hickok’.

From 1912 to 1948,

painting was an Olympic event.

In 1924, Jack Yeats,

brother of the poet W. B. Yeats,

took the silver:

Ireland’s first-ever Olympic medal.

William Blake’s one-man exhibition

of paintings in 1809

received only one review.

The critic described him as a lunatic.

In 1891, Claude Monet won 100,000 francs

in the French national lottery.

Pigeons can tell the difference between

impressionist paintings by Monet

and cubist works by Picasso.

They can even tell when

the Monets are hung upside down.

There are no cubes in Cubism.

Cézanne’s theory was that everything

could be broken down into

cylinders, spheres and cones.

Tour de France riders

need to eat the equivalent of

27 cheeseburgers a day.

Lightning strikes the Earth

8.6 million times a day or

about 100 times a second.

A single bolt of lightning

contains enough energy

to cook

100,000 pieces of toast.

Bovril

was originally called

‘Johnston’s Fluid Beef ’.

Hovis

was originally called

‘Smith’s Patent Germ Bread’.

7-Up

was originally called

‘Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda’.

The Bank of America

was originally called

the Bank of Italy.

Reducing the voting age to 18,

the introduction of 24-hour licensing

and passports for pets

were all policies initiated by

the Official Monster Raving Loony Party.

The smallest known dinosaur

was about four inches tall

and weighed less than

a chihuahua.

Each year, drug baron Pablo Escobar

had to write off 10% of his cash holdings

because of rats nibbling away

at his huge stash of bank notes.

The first-ever edition of the Daily Mirror

came with a free mirror.

After two weeks of wear

a pair of jeans will have grown

a 1,000-strong colony

of bacteria on the front,

1,500–2,500 on the back

and 10,000 on the crotch.

If all the salt in the sea

were spread evenly over the land,

it would be 500 feet thick.

The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883

was the loudest sound in recorded history.

It was heard 3,000 miles away

in Mauritius.

Summer on Neptune lasts for 40 years,

but the temperature is minus 200°C.

Summer nights in the Faroe Islands

are so well illuminated that

between May and July

the lighthouses are turned off.

In the 1st century ad most ships

in the northern hemisphere only sailed

between May and September.

William Carstares (1649–1715)

was the last man in Britain

to be given the thumbscrew.

As torture was illegal in England,

he had to be taken to Edinburgh.

Mussolini tortured his enemies

by forcing them to swallow

massive doses of castor oil.

The second-largest lake in Bolivia

is called Lake Poopó.

It’s not a freshwater lake.

The whole of Shakespeare

contains only about 20,000

different words –

less than half the vocabulary of the

average English speaker today.

The whole of Liechtenstein

can be rented for $70,000 a night,

for a minimum of two nights.

It sleeps 900.

St Vitus

is the patron saint of oversleeping.

The International Space Station

is as roomy as a five-bedroom house

and travels at 17,500 mph.

A marshmallow travelling at sea level

would not begin to melt

from friction caused by air resistance

until it reached Mach 1.6

(1,218 mph).

When a medium in a trance

offered to answer any question,

Groucho Marx asked,

‘What’s the capital of North Dakota?’

The popular Los Angeles beverage

Original New York Express Iced Coffee

is made in a factory in Singapore.

Cameroon is home to the Eton tribe.

The Eton word for ‘thank you’ is

abumgang.

Arabic words are written right to left, but

Arabic numbers left to right.

Arabic speakers reading anything

with a lot of numbers in

have to read in both directions

at once.

In 2010, the Catholic Church had an

income of $97 billion.

Trombone

is French for

‘paperclip’.

The word ‘gas’ was invented by

the Flemish chemist

Jan Baptist van Helmont (1579–1644).

He also invented the word blas

but it didn’t catch on.

The word ‘gasoline’

doesn’t come from ‘gas’. It comes from

Cazeline – after John Cassell,

founder of the publisher Cassell & Co.,

who was the first to sell it commercially.

Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869)

invented the thesaurus

and the slide rule.

Edwin Beard Budding (1775–1846)

invented the lawnmower

and the adjustable spanner.

In 1928, the Solomon Islands pidgin

for ‘adjustable spanner’ was

spanner he go walkabout

and a ‘saw’ was

this fella pull-him-he-come-push-him-he-go

brother belong axe.

The Zulu for ‘Jack-in-a-Box’ is

udoli ohlala ebokisini ukuthi ufuna

ukusabisa abantu abaningi.

The Malay for ‘slate’ is

sejenis batu berwarna kelabu

kebiru-biruan yang selalu digunakan

sebagai atap ruman.

Wanklank

is Dutch for

a discordant noise.

In 2010,

Ghana banned

the sale of second-hand underpants.

No one has ever seen an atom.

They’re too small to be seen

by a microscope and can’t be counted

or weighed individually.

Plato thought

that the smallest particles of matter

were tiny right-angled triangles.

Since at least the time of Pythagoras in

500 BC, no sensible educated person

has believed the Earth

was flat.

A snowflake that falls

on a glacier in central Greenland

can take 200,000 years

to reach the sea.

The King James Bible

has inspired the lyrics

of more pop songs

than any other book.

In 2001,

the World Christian Encyclopaedia

counted 33,830 different

Christian denominations.

Jehovah’s Witnesses do not celebrate

Easter, Christmas or birthdays.

For 48 years

after tinned food was invented,

people who wanted to eat it

had to use a hammer and chisel.

The can opener wasn’t invented

until 1858.

The screwdriver was invented

a hundred years before the screw.

It was originally used

to extract nails.

‘Marking’ was invented

at Cambridge University in 1792

by a chemistry tutor

called William Farish.

Margaret Thatcher

was part of the team that invented

Mr Whippy ice cream.

A single sperm contains 37.5 mb

of DNA information.

One ejaculation represents a data transfer

of 15,875 gb,

equivalent to the combined capacity

of 62 MacBook Pro laptops.

70% of all animals in the jungle

rely on figs for their survival.

In Antigua,

‘fig’ means banana.

Linnaeus named the banana

Musa paradisiaca because he thought it

might have been the forbidden fruit

of the Garden of Eden.

The citizens of Kuwait

celebrated the end of the first Gulf War

by firing weapons into the air.

20 Kuwaitis died as a result of bullets

falling from the sky.

The main predators of flamingos

are zookeepers.

At the outbreak of the Second World War,

zookeepers killed all the poisonous

insects and snakes in London Zoo,

in case it was bombed

and they escaped.

The boa constrictor

is the only living animal

whose common name is

exactly the same

as its scientific name.

In the 318 years between 1539 and 1857,

there were only 317 divorces

in England.

At the 1900 Paris Olympics,

events included Live Pigeon Shooting

and Long Jump for Horses.

Under the Wildlife and Countryside Act,

it is explicitly illegal in Britain

to use a machine gun

to kill a hedgehog.

In ancient Greek

the word ‘idiot’ meant

anyone who wasn’t a politician.

The Icelandic phone book

is ordered by

first name.

The human eye

can detect 10 million

different shades of colour.

Wombats

have cubic faeces.

Harvard University

has the largest ant collection

in the world.

It takes a photon 40,000

years to get from the centre of the Sun

to its surface, but only 8.3 minutes

to get from there to the Earth.

For water to flow 100 metres

through the ground down a 1° slope takes

5 days through gravel,

13.7 years through sand and

137,000 years through clay.

In 1969,

Apollo 11 returned from the Moon

in half the time it took to get from

Boston to New York by stagecoach

in 1769.

New York City drifts about one inch away

from Europe every year.

Between 1960 and 1977, the secret number

authorising US presidents

to launch nuclear missiles was

00000000.

Jimmy Carter once

sent a jacket to the dry-cleaner’s

with the nuclear detonation codes

still in the pocket.

Worried about his grades at law school,

Richard Nixon broke into the Dean’s

office – only to discover that he was

top of his class.

The highest scoring word in Scrabble

is oxyphenbutazone, potentially earning

1,178 points.

(It’s a drug used to treat arthritis.)

A coal-fired power station

puts 100 times more radiation into the air

than a nuclear power plant

producing the same amount of energy.

Treasure Island in Lake Mindemoya

on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron

is the largest island in a lake on an island

in a lake in the world.

The strongest creatures on Earth are

gonorrhoea bacteria.

They can pull 100,000 times

their own body weight.

A dog has the same ecological footprint as

two Toyota Landcruisers;

a cat the same environmental effect as a

Volkswagen Golf;

two hamsters the same as a plasma TV.

Humans

have the same number

of hair follicles

as chimpanzees.

Gorillas and potatoes

have two more chromosomes

than people.

The average person who lives to be 75

will have spent six years

dreaming.

The word ambisinistrous is the

opposite of ambidextrous;

it means

‘no good with either hand’.

James Garfield,

20th president of the USA,

could write Greek with one hand

while writing Latin with the other.

Young Neanderthal girls

had bigger biceps

than an adult male human.

The second man to go over

Niagara Falls in a barrel,

Bobby Leach, survived the fall

but later died as a result of

slipping on a piece

of orange peel.

An orange is a berry but

a strawberry isn’t.

Vatican City has

the highest crime rate in the world.

Though the resident population

is only just over 800,

more than 600 crimes

are committed there each year.

90% of the crime

in Helmand province

is committed

by the Afghan police.

50% more US soldiers committed suicide

in Afghanistan in 2012

than were killed in action.

In 117 AD, Emperor Hadrian declared

attempted suicide by soldiers

a form of desertion

and made it a capital offence.

Jack Bauer,

the lead character in the TV series 24,

killed 112 people

in the first five seasons of the show.

The longest hangover

in medical literature

lasted four weeks.

It belonged to a 37-year-old man

from Glasgow.

In 1715, a group of Jacobite rebels

failed to take Edinburgh Castle

because their rope ladders

were six feet too short.

The first manager

of the first McDonald’s franchise

was called Ed MacLuckie.

Coca-Cola in the Maldives

is made from seawater.

A ‘riot’ in England and Wales

must legally involve

a minimum of 12 people.

Under US federal law

it’s only three people

and in Nevada

only two.

More than 1 in 20 football injuries

are caused by

celebrating goals on the pitch.

Slavery was not made

a statutory offence in the UK

until 6th April 2010.

Diagnosed with pleurisy,

Sir Robert Chesebrough, the inventor of

Vaseline, decided to coat himself

in his product from head to foot.

He survived and lived to be 96.

In 1915, Charlie Chaplin entered

a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest

in San Francisco. Not only did he not win,

he failed even to make the final.

Male fruit flies rejected by females

drink significantly more alcohol than

those that have had a successful encounter.

In Inuktitut,

iminngernaveersaartunngortussaavunga

means

‘I should try not to become an alcoholic’.

2,520 is the smallest number

that can be exactly divided

by all the numbers

1 to 10.

2.5 million Mills & Boon novels

were pulped and added to the tarmac

of the UK’s M6 toll motorway

to make it more absorbent.

In 1999, more than 3,000 people

were hospitalised after

tripping over a

laundry basket.

In 1997, 39 people in the UK

found themselves in

hospital with

tea-cosy-related

injuries.

Deipnophobia n.

The fear of

dinner party conversations.

Nomophobia n.

The fear of being

out of mobile phone contact.

Metrophobia n.

Fear of poetry.

Lachanophobia n.

Fear of vegetables.

Since 1990, the number of people

living in poverty in China

has fallen from

85% to 15%.

A ‘knot’ is something

tied in a single piece of rope or line.

Something that joins two ropes

together is a ‘bend’.

A baby oyster

is called a ‘spat’.

More chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos

are eaten by people every year

than there are in

all the zoos in the world.

In the 19th century,

sausages were marketed as

‘bags of mystery’.

If a vampire were to feed once a day

and turn each of his victims

into a vampire,

the entire human population of the planet

would become vampires

in just over a month.

Relative to our galaxy,

the Earth is travelling through space

at more than 500,000 mph.

The Sun takes 220 million years

to orbit the galaxy,

a journey it has made

20 times so far.

Abbey-lubber n.

A lazy monk.

Acrochordon n.

A wart that hangs down

like a string.

Apport n.

Something that appears out of thin air:

the opposite of a vanishing.

Autotelic adj.

Worth doing for its own sake.

Although Shakespeare’s works run to

more than a million words,

only 14 exist in his own handwriting:

12 of them are his signatures

and the other two are ‘by’ and ‘me’.

George W. Bush named

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

as his favourite childhood book. It was

published when he was 23 years old.

In 2012, Britain’s Eurovision entrant,

Englebert Humperdinck (76), was

not only the oldest of the contestants,

he was older than more than 20

of the countries they represented.

Swans do not sing (before dying or

otherwise), although one species, the

Whistling Swan, whistles a bit.

There are ten times as many stars

in the known universe

as there are

grains of sand in the world.

The ties bought in America

for Father’s Day each year

would stretch from New York to Rome.

There are thought to be 100,000

uncharted mountains under the sea.

Only 1,000 or so have ever been mapped.

Aborigines, whose culture reaches back

to the last Ice Age, have names for

(and can locate) mountains

that have been under the sea

for 8,000 years.

Just like humans,

British cows moo in accents

specific to their region.

95% of all data in the world

is still stored on paper.

Most of it is never looked at again.

The common shrew

protects itself from predators

by dying of fright.

The next person to walk on the Moon

will almost certainly be

Chinese.

Almost half of all babies in China

are born by Caesarean section.

The half a million tonnes of chocolate

eaten each year in Britain

represent 87% of the entire

annual cocoa production

of Latin America.

A single zinc mine in Namibia

uses a fifth of the country’s

electricity supply.

Per gram per second, more energy

runs through a sunflower

than through the Sun itself.

It takes ten times

as much energy to heat water

as it does to heat iron.

It takes ten times

as much energy to turn water into steam

as it does to bring it to the boil.

It takes an hour

to soft-boil an ostrich egg

and an hour and a half

to hard-boil one.

It takes between 70,000 and 150,000

crocuses to make

a kilo of saffron.

Alexander the Great

washed his hair in saffron

to keep it shiny and orange.

In 1999, a four-year-old girl

turned yellow

after drinking too much

Sunny Delight.

Russian has no word for ‘blue’,

only two different words for

‘light blue’ and ‘dark blue’.

Andy Warhol always wore

green underpants.

25 million Bibles were printed in 2011,

compared to 208 million IKEA catalogues.

The English version of Wikipedia

has 50 times more words than

the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Up to 2010, Wikipedia had taken

100 million person-hours to write:

about the same amount of time

that the population of the USA

spends watching TV ad breaks

in a single weekend.

There is more information

in one edition of the New York Times than

the average person

in 17th-century England

would have come across in a lifetime.

When Einstein published his

Theory of General Relativity,

the New York Times sent their

golfing correspondent

to interview him.

The historic news of the

first manned powered flight

by the Wright Brothers

first appeared in the magazine

Gleanings in Bee Culture.

Dune, by Frank Herbert, the world’s best-selling

science fiction novel, was rejected

over 20 times before being accepted

by a publisher of car manuals.

Ernest Hemingway bought the

shotgun that he used to kill himself

at Abercrombie & Fitch.

Leonardo da Vinci

was the first person to observe

the curvature of the human spine.

Until then everyone had assumed

that it was straight.

Rosa whitfield is a rose

named after actress June Whitfield.

As she pointed out,

‘The catalogue describes it as

“superb for bedding,

best up against a wall”.’

Someone who is cock-throppled

has an extremely prominent

Adam’s apple.

The symbols used by !$%@ing cartoonists

to indicate swearing are called grawlixes.

Jeremy Bentham’s body

has been dressed

in moth-resistant underwear

since 1939.

When Jeremy Paxman

was at Cambridge, he failed

to get into his college’s

University Challenge team.

Before Jeremy Clarkson

became a journalist,

he sold Paddington Bears

for a living.

Jeremy Kyle’s father

was the Queen Mother’s

accountant and personal secretary.

A babalevante

is someone who makes

feeble jokes.

Babeship

is another word for

infancy.

Borborygmi

are stomach rumbles.

Buggerare

is Italian for

‘to cheat’ or ‘swindle’.

If you have a pizza

with radius z and thickness a,

its volume is pi*z*z*a.

In 1998, 10,113 American women

insured themselves against

Virgin Birth

at the millennium.

The first motorist to be fined

for speeding in the UK was

Walter Arnold in 1896.

He was doing 8 mph in a 2 mph zone.

The first London Underground

trains were nicknamed

‘sewer trams’.

The world’s lightest metal

is 100 times lighter than styrofoam

and can rest on a dandelion puff

without damaging it.

Graphene,

the world’s strongest material,

is a million times thinner than paper

but 200 times stronger than steel.

To break through a sheet

of graphene as thick as cling film

would take the force of an elephant

balanced on the point of a pencil.

The pressure in the deepest ocean,

at the bottom of the Marianas Trench,

is equal to the weight of ten brown bears

balancing on a postage stamp.

All polar bears are Irish:

they’re descended from brown bears

that lived in Ireland

over 10,000 years ago.

More than half the world’s population

is under 25

and more than half of it

is bilingual.

Established writers and artists are

18 times more likely

to kill themselves

than the general population.

People with schizophrenia

are three times more likely to smoke

than the average person.

Zischeln

is a useful German verb meaning

‘to whisper angrily’.

The Italian verb asolare

means ‘to pass time in a delightful but

meaningless

way’.

Hungarian has no words

for ‘son’ or ‘daughter’,

but nine specific words

for different kinds of brother or sister.

In North Welsh,

the word for ‘now’ is rwan,

in South Welsh it is nawr,

the same word spelt backwards.

Gold has its own E number.

E175

is officially suitable for consumption

by vegetarians, vegans and members

of all religious groups.

The Victorians

made tiepins

out of badgers’ penis bones.

Some parts of Tasmania

are so fertile that

the topsoil is 70 feet deep.

Trinity College, Cambridge,

has won more Nobel Prizes

than the whole of Italy.

The human body has 100 trillion cells,

each one a 10,000th the size of a pinhead

but containing enough DNA instructions

to fill 1,000 600-page books.

Every three seconds,

the Sun emits more neutrinos

than the number of atoms

in all the humans who have ever lived.

Neutrinos are 100,000 times

smaller than electrons,

but there are so many of them

that they may outweigh

all the visible matter in the universe.

If an atom were the size

of the Solar System,

a neutrino would be the size

of a golf ball.

The man who sees to the needs of VIPs

in the official presidential guest house

in Washington DC

is called Randy Bumgardner.

The founder of Pan American Airlines

was called

Juan Trippe.

The Archbishop of Manila

from 1974–2003

was called Cardinal Sin.

Robert Burns was never called

Rabbie or Robbie – though he did

occasionally call himself Spunkie.

The film Jaws was based on a novel

by Peter Benchley.

When he couldn’t think of a title,

his father, Nathaniel, suggested

What’s That Noshin’ On Ma Leg.

As soon as tiger shark embryos

develop teeth

they attack and eat each other

in the womb.

If the three quarks in a hydrogen atom

were scaled up to the size of garden peas,

the hydrogen atom

would be 1,000 miles across.

If all the land in Finland

were distributed equally,

each Finn would have 14% more space

than Heathrow Airport’s shopping area.

Human saliva

contains a painkiller called opiorphin

that is six times more powerful

than morphine.

The average American produces

10,000 gallons of saliva in a lifetime:

about the same amount of water as leaks

from the average American home

in a year.

The platypus and the echidna

are the only mammals

that could make their own custard:

they both lay eggs

and produce milk.

The Chupa Chups logo

was designed by

Salvador Dalí.

4,000 McDonald’s hamburgers

(as many as you could get from one cow)

are eaten every minute.

Every year,

4 million cats

are eaten in Asia.

In 2011, Chinese billionaire Long Liyuan

was murdered at a business lunch

by means of poison in his

slow-boiled

cat-meat

casserole.

When eating jelly babies,

nearly eight out of ten people

bite off the heads first.

More gold is recoverable

from a tonne of personal computers

than from 17 tonnes

of gold ore.

The gold dissolved in the world’s oceans

is estimated to be worth $475 trillion:

about 30 times

the US public debt.

In 1917, John D. Rockefeller

could have paid off

the whole US public debt on his own.

Today, Bill Gates’s entire fortune

would barely cover two months’ interest.

Tyrannosaurus rex (65 million years ago)

is closer in time to us than to

Diplodocus (150 million years ago).

There are about 6,900 languages

in existence but more than

half the world’s population

uses only 20 of them.

In English, the name of every number

shares a letter with each neighbour.

One shares an O with two, which shares a

T with three, which shares an R with four,

which shares an F with five, which shares

an I with six – and so on indefinitely.

Archimedes’ number myriakis-myriostas

periodu myriakis-myriston

arithmon myriai myriades

is one followed by 80 quadrillion zeroes.

In 2010, YouTube was watched

700 billion times, but 99% of the views

were of only 30% of the videos.

In 1900, all the world’s mathematical

knowledge could be written in about

80 books; today it would fill

more than 100,000.

In 2005, the 54 billionaires in Britain

paid only £14.7 million in income tax

between them. Of this,

£9 million came from

James Dyson.

In 2011, only nine of the 62 owners

of apartments in One Hyde Park, London,

the world’s most expensive block of flats,

paid any council tax.

Over 600,000 companies

(including 25 with flats in One Hyde Park)

are registered in the British Virgin Islands

(population 28,882).

In the first month of its life,

a silkworm puts on

10,000 times its birth weight.

A female ferret

will die

if she doesn’t have sex for a year.

A six-inch catfish has

more than

250,000 taste buds.

A full Kindle

weighs a billionth of a billionth

of a gram

more than a brand-new one.

There are over 1,200 species

of bat in the world

and not one of them is blind.

There are 4,800 species

of frog in the world

but only one of them goes ‘ribbit’.

Eight times as many people belong to

the National Trust

as to the

Conservative, Labour and

Liberal Democrat parties

combined.

Every human being

starts out life as an arsehole:

it’s the first part of the body

to form in the womb.

51% of British women under 50

have never been married:

twice as many as in 1980.

Kanye North and Kanye South

(but not Kanye West)

are parliamentary constituencies

in Botswana.

The animal rights group PETA

claims that cows can suffer humiliation

if people laugh at them.

Wagamama

is Japanese for ‘selfish’.

In 2009, Exxon made $19 billion profit

but received a $156 million

federal tax rebate.

Only 2% of women

describe themselves

as beautiful.

In the 1950s,

3-D films

were known as

‘deepies’.

Loch Ness

is deep enough

and long enough

to contain the entire

population of the world

ten times over.

40% of the electricity in Pakistan

goes missing, half of it stolen:

if there’s a power cut

(which is often),

they just steal the wires.

In 2011, British trains were delayed

by 16,000 hours because of people

stealing metal parts from the railways.

After Einstein died,

his brain was pickled,

sliced into 240 cubes and

left in a box marked ‘Costa Cider’

for 20 years.

Sir Walter Raleigh’s devoted widow

Elizabeth kept his decapitated head

with her in a velvet bag

for 29 years.

Forflitten adj.

Overwhelmed

by unreasonable

and out-of-proportion

scolding.

Forwallowed adj.

Weary with being

tossed about.

Rhinorrhea n.

The medical condition

otherwise known as

‘a runny nose’.

Subitise vb

To perceive the number

of objects in a group

without actually

counting them.

An acrocomic is someone with long hair.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary,

the word hasn’t been used

since it was coined in 1626.

Until now, that is.

The word ‘unfriend’

first appeared in print in 1659.

Berk and charlie (as in ‘a proper charlie’)

are rhyming slang for

‘Berkshire Hunt’ and ‘Charlie Hunt’.

The most popular beers

in Turkmenistan are called

‘Berk’ and ‘Zip’.

As a reward

for winning the part of Harry Potter,

the 11-year-old Daniel Radcliffe

was allowed to stay up

and watch Fawlty Towers.

Durham University

offers a Harry Potter module.

It includes the topic

‘Gryffindor and Slytherin:

prejudice and intolerance in the classroom’.

The word ‘school’

comes from the ancient Greek for

‘free time’.

In particle physics, a ‘barn’ is an area

that covers a billionth of the cross-section

of a silk fibre. It’s called a barn because

(in subatomic terms) it’s so huge.

In 2010, twice as many Britons died

in accidents in their own homes

as in traffic accidents.

The names Honda and Toyota

derive from Japanese words for

different kinds of rice field.

In French, Hungarian, Spanish,

Irish, Italian, Portuguese,

Latvian, Serbian, Croatian,

Bosnian, Montenegrin and Tagalog,

the words for ‘time’ and ‘weather’

are the same.

Britain

is the windiest country

in Europe.

The Inuit use the same word,

sila, to mean both

‘weather’ and ‘consciousness’.

There are five categories of hurricane.

The slowest outpaces a cheetah;

the fastest beats the world’s

fastest roller coaster

(149 mph).

There are at least 300

earthquakes a year in the UK,

but only 11 people have ever died in one.

There is no known scientific way

of predicting earthquakes.

The most reliable method is

to count the number of missing cats

in the local paper: if it trebles,

an earthquake is imminent.

The amount of water on Earth is constant,

and continually recycled over time:

some of the water you drink

will have passed through

a dinosaur.

95% of the lead

in British army bullets

comes from recycled materials.

A squishop

is a squire

who is also a bishop.

Muammar

is Arabic for ‘long-lived’.

A newborn giant panda weighs

less than a cup of tea.

The CIA reads

up to 5 million tweets a day.

85% of the clicking on web ads

is done by 8% of the people.

Since 2008,

the number of clicks has halved.

The 6-trillionth, 8-trillionth,

9-trillionth and 10-trillionth

digits of pi

are all fives.

Under Chairman Mao,

every Chinese family

was obliged to kill a sparrow a week

to stop them eating all the rice.

The project was ineffective because

sparrows don’t eat rice.

Barley

has twice as many genes as

people.

Scotland

has twice as many giant pandas as

Conservative MPs.

Statistically speaking,

the Vatican has two popes

per square kilometre.

Sending a man to the Moon

and finding Osama Bin Laden

cost the US government

about the same amount of time and money:

ten years and $100 billion.

IMAX projectors weigh as much as hippos.

Their bulbs cost $5 million each

and are bright enough to be seen

from the International Space Station.

The International Space Station

has cost more than 30 times

its own weight in gold.

In 2005,

Americans spent 6 billion hours

filling in tax forms,

at an estimated cost of $265 billion.

Between 1948 and 1998,

20,362 Israelis were killed in wars

and 20,852 were killed on the roads.

The American TV sex therapist

Dr Ruth Westheimer

trained as an Israeli sniper.

Snipur

is Icelandic for ‘clitoris’.

Taking cocaine

increases the chance

of having a heart attack

within the hour

by 2,400%.

Oystercatchers

don’t catch oysters.

Cows carry cowpox

but chickens

don’t carry chickenpox.

Cocks don’t have cocks.

In 97% of bird species,

the males don’t have penises.

The rooster on the Corn Flakes box

is called Cornelius.

They chose a rooster

because the word ceiliog,

Welsh for cockerel,

sounds a bit like Kellogg.

Welsh

has no single words for

‘yes’ or ‘no’.

Russian

has no word for

‘bigot’.

French

has no word for

‘awkward’.

Latin

has no word for

‘interesting’.

Uranium

is 40 times more common

than silver

and 500 times more common

than gold.

In Spanish,

the word esposas

means both

‘wives’ and ‘handcuffs’.

Boghandler

is Danish for

‘bookseller’.

Serbia

is the world’s leading exporter

of raspberries.

In 1956,

there were only 12 cars

on Ibiza.

About half a million mice

live in the London Underground.

The Companies Act (2006)

is the longest act in history;

it is so complex that

most British companies

unwittingly break the law

six times a day.

Per head of population,

Britain has 13 times

as many accountants

as Germany.

The average pencil can write

45,000 words,

or a single line 35 miles long.

Venus rotates so slowly on its axis

that its day is longer than its year.

Until the 1960s,

the only reliable pregnancy test

was to inject a woman’s urine

into a female African clawed frog.

If the woman was pregnant,

the frog would ovulate within 12 hours.

Chemotherapy

is a by-product of the mustard gas

used in the First World War.

The year after

the American Civil War ended,

a fifth of Mississippi’s state budget

was spent on artificial limbs

for wounded soldiers.

More than 90%

of all the blackcurrants

grown in Britain

go into Ribena.

Nutmeg is illegal in Saudi Arabia

because it is hallucinogenic

if consumed in large quantities.

Mushrooms

are more closely related to humans

than to plants.

The first holiday

organised by Thomas Cook

was a temperance outing

in the East Midlands.

Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo

all mean ‘capital’

in their respective languages.

Athens is the only capital city in Europe

where the air is more polluted

outside than inside.

Skoda

is Czech for

‘shame’, ‘damage’ or ‘pity’.

At least 109 journeys

between adjacent London Tube stations

are quicker to walk.

QI is the most commonly played word

in Tournament Scrabble.

It’s pronounced ‘chee’ and means

‘life force’ or ‘energy’ in Mandarin.

There are at least 27 million slaves

in the world today,

more than were ever seized from Africa

in the 400 years of the slave trade.

Slaves in America in 1850

cost the equivalent of $40,000.

The going rate today is $90.

More than 80% of the world’s population

takes caffeine,

in tea, coffee or cola,

every day.

There is one and a half times

more caffeine in milk chocolate

than in Coca-Cola.

A lethal dose of chocolate

for a human being is about 22 lb

or 40 bars of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk.

A single M&M is enough

to kill a small songbird.

Oliver Cromwell

died of malaria.

To keep someone to prison in the UK

costs £45,000 a year:

one and a half times as much

as it would take to send them to Eton.

Fictional Old Etonians include

James Bond, Captain Hook, Bertie Wooster,

Tarzan, John Steed from The Avengers

and Mr Darcy from Bridget Jones’s Diary.

St Brigid of Ireland,

the 6th-century abbess of Kildare,

was noted for the miracle of

transforming her used bathwater

into beer for visiting clerics.

It costs more to make the cardboard box

that Shredded Wheat comes in

than it does to make

the Shredded Wheat itself.

The word botulism

comes from the Latin botulus,

meaning ‘a stomach full of delicacies’.

Half a pound of botulinum toxin is

enough to kill

the entire human population of the world.

Botox is made from botulinum toxin.

Almost all the botox in the world

is made in a single factory

in Ireland.

The average British woman

spends £100,000 on make-up

in a lifetime.

All blue-eyed people are mutants.

The first ones appeared

as recently as 5,000 years ago.

The scaly anteater, the banded anteater

and the spiny anteater are not anteaters

even though they all eat ants

and are called anteaters.

In the 1950s, to allow babies of students

at Trinity Hall, Cambridge,

to enter the premises,

they were re-defined as cats.

William E. Boeing, founder of

United Airlines,

had a pet Pekingese called

General Motors.

General Electric is the only company

remaining from the original Dow Jones

index of 1896. Since then it has had

fewer than half as many CEOs (4)

as the Vatican has had popes (10).

A basterly gullion

is ‘a bastard’s bastard’.

Batology

is the study of blackberries.

Botony

means

‘having three knobs’.

Swindon

has the lowest demand for Viagra

of any town in the UK.

The mute swan

is not mute.

Engastration

is the stuffing of one bird

with another.

Cows eat only grass

but have 25,000 taste buds:

two and a half times as many

as humans.

In American Samoa,

it is illegal to beg

with the aid of

a public address system.

A new owl species

is discovered approximately

every ten years.

An adult produces enough hydrogen

in their urine each year

to drive a car

2,700 kilometres.

In 2012, the population of Facebook

passed 1 billion.

If it were a country,

it would be the 3rd-largest

in the world.

Before the Renaissance,

three-quarters of all the books

in the world were in

Chinese.

About 200,000 academic journals

are published in English each year.

The average number

of readers per article

is five.

The average numbers of readers

of any given published scientific paper

is said to be 0.6.

There are two cs

in the word Icelandic,

but there is no letter c

in the Icelandic language.

Katujjiqatigiittiarnirlu

is Inuktitut for

‘simplicity’.

A barnacle’s penis

can be up to 20 times

the length of its body.

27,000 trees

are felled each day

for toilet paper.

The average lavatory seat

is much cleaner

than the average toothbrush.

Your teeth are home to 10,000 million

bacteria per square centimetre.

The pleasant smell of earth after rain

is caused by bacteria in the soil

and is called petrichor –

from Greek petros, ‘stone’ and ichor,

‘the fluid that flows

through the veins of the gods’.

The muscles that close a crocodile’s jaws

exert a force equivalent to

a truck falling off a cliff,

but the muscles that open them

are so weak that

they can be kept shut by a rubber band.

The Royal Mail spends £1 million a year

on a billion red rubber bands.

British postmen use

2 million of them every day.

A hammerhead shark

can be rendered completely immobile

for 15 minutes by turning it over

and tickling its tummy.

Tümmler

is German for

a bottle-nosed dolphin.

99% of Austrians are German,

though most Austrians

insist that they aren’t.

It is commonplace for Austrians

to claim that Hitler

was in fact a German,

whereas Beethoven

was really an Austrian.

Beethoven

was of Belgian extraction.

There are no moles

in Ireland.

If all the asteroids

in the Solar System

were lumped together,

they’d be smaller than the Moon.

There are six vehicles

and 50 tonnes of litter

on the Moon

left behind by the Apollo missions.

Because there is no weather

on the Moon,

the footprints of the 12 men

who walked on it

are still there.

Most astronauts

become two inches taller

in space.

Google earns

$20 billion a year from advertising,

more than the primetime revenues of

CBS, NBC, ABC and FOX combined.

69% of people

in the rear of an aeroplane

survive crashes,

compared to 49%

at the front.

20% of people in the UK

believe they have a food allergy,

but only 2% actually do.

The American secret service

tried to spike Hitler’s carrots

with female hormones

to change him into a woman.

Almost 2,000 carrot seeds

will fit into

a teaspoon.

An estimated 18 million spoons,

together weighing as much

as four blue whales,

go missing in Melbourne

every year.

Melbourne

used to be called

Batmania.

Alice,

the 3rd-largest town

in Australia’s Northern Territory,

used to be called

Stuart.

40% of all bottled water

sold in the world

is bottled tap water.

The Antarctic is a continent

entirely surrounded by oceans;

the Arctic is an ocean

almost entirely surrounded by continents.

The average American

absorbs 34 GB of information a day,

though half of it is obtained

from playing

video games.

Half the Saxon aristocracy

were killed

at the battle of Hastings

in 1066.

More than twice as many people

are killed by vending machines

as by sharks.

Placebos are 30% more effective

as an antidote for depression

than drugs.

If a tree were planted

for each Coca-Cola sold,

we could reforest the Earth

in three years.

The inventor of ‘Best before’ dates,

originally for milk,

was Al Capone.

After his wife’s death,

a heart-broken Benjamin Disraeli

found that she’d kept all the hair

from the haircuts she’d given him

in 33 years of marriage.

Elizabeth Taylor

lived to be 79

but she never learned

to boil an egg.

The Perthshire village of Dull

is planning to twin with

Boring, Oregon.

More than 50% of koalas

have chlamydia.

Ants can survive

in a microwave:

they are small enough

to dodge the rays.

Anthophobia

is the fear of flowers.

The Greek national anthem

has 158 verses,

but only two of them

are ever sung.

The national anthem of Spain

has no words.

Prince Charles

is the longest-serving

heir to the throne in British history.

He has held the position

for 60 years.

Some parts of Antarctica

have had no rain or snow

for 2 million years.

Bubblewrap

was first produced in a

New Jersey garage in 1957.

Its inventors were trying to make

easy-wipe textured wallpaper.

There is no such thing

as a vegetarian snake.

Snakes eat nothing

except other animals.

For 249 years,

the tallest building in the world

was Lincoln Cathedral.

Angel Falls, Venezuela,

is 17 times higher

than Niagara.

A typical bird’s feathers

weigh more than

twice as much

as its bones.

Only 35%

of the average person’s

Twitter followers are

actual people.

‘Day dapple’ is an old Irish term

for the time of day when

a person can no longer

be distinguished

from a bush.

The ancient Greek for ostrich

is strouthokamelos,

or ‘sparrow-camel’.

‘Influenza’

is Italian for ‘influence’:

heavenly bodies

were once thought

to affect our own.

San Marino has eight times

as many doctors per person

as any other country in the world.

Humans

have been hunter-gatherers

for 99% of their history.

Ostriches

can be trained

to herd sheep.

The French for ‘badger’

is blaireau,

which also means

‘shaving brush’.

WTF

is the acronym of the

World Taekwondo Federation.

In 2011,

the Internet reached

13.7 billion pages:

one for every year

since the Big Bang.

The entire Internet

weighs about the same

as one large

strawberry.

A male right whale

is half the size of a male blue whale

but has testes five times bigger:

each one weighs as much

as a large horse.

Ted Turner

owns 50,000 bison.

Kestrels

can locate voles from the sky

because of ultra-violet light

reflected by their urine.

Henry VIII had a Groom of the Stool

whose duty was to see that

‘the house of easement be sweet and clear’:

in other words,

to wipe the king’s bottom.

Sitting on the lavatory for eight hours

uses the same number of calories

as one hour’s jogging.

It was 33 years

after loo paper was invented

in Green Bay, Wisconsin,

that it could finally be advertised as

‘splinter free’.

Sudan

has more pyramids

than Egypt.

Steve Jobs was half Syrian.

His annual salary

as CEO of Apple

was $1.

‘Forty’

is the only number in English

that has its letters

in alphabetical order.

43 million

£1 coins

currently in circulation

are forgeries.

Since 2012,

all new 5p and 10p coins

issued by the Royal Mint

have been magnetic.

The highest-value notes

issued by the Bank of England are

Giants (£1 million) and

Titans (£100 million).

The chemical name for titin,

the world’s largest known protein,

is 189,819 letters long.

In Japan, Tintin is called Tantan

because Tintin

is pronounced ‘Chin-Chin’

and means ‘penis’.

Kim Il-Sung,

founder of North Korea,

was born on the day

the Titanic sank.

Kim Il-Sung’s grandson,

Jong-Nam, was sacked as heir

after being arrested trying to

enter Japan on a false passport

to visit Disneyland.

In the last 60 years,

more than 23,000 North Koreans

have defected to South Korea.

Only two Koreans

have gone in the opposite direction.

Korea

is Finnish for

‘gorgeous’.

The exchange rate in Vietnam is about

20,000 dongs to the dollar.

It costs the US mint

over 11 cents

to make each 5-cent coin.

‘Hey Jingo!’

is a conjuror’s call

for something to appear –

the opposite of

‘Hey Presto!’

which calls for it

to be gone.

Between 1917 and 1940,

the cure for patients with

syphilis

was to give them

malaria.

Gatwick,

the name of the UK’s

2nd-largest airport,

means ‘the farm where goats are kept’.

During the 2010 World Cup,

100 bar staff at the pub chain

Clover Taverns

changed their names to

Wayne Rooney.

The company has since gone bankrupt.

In 2007, Robert Stewart of Ayr

was put on the Sex Offenders Register

for having sex with a bicycle.

In 1993, Karl Watkins

of Redditch, Worcestershire,

was jailed for having sex

with pavements.

There is at least ten times

as much crime on TV

as there is in the real world.

Starbucks offers

87,000

different drinks combinations.

Britons eat 97%

of the world’s baked beans.

The last private resident

of 10 Downing Street

was called Mr Chicken.

Almost half of all Americans today

are classified as ‘living in poverty’ or

‘barely scraping by’.

46.4% pay no income tax.

The US has more lawyers per capita

than any country in the world

and twice as many prisoners

as lawyers.

The US has only 5%

of the world’s population,

but almost 25%

of its prison population.

Since smoking was banned in 2004,

the main currency in US prisons

is mackerel.

Prisoners waiting to be executed on

Death Row in America

are given a physical beforehand,

to ensure they are fit enough to die.

In his last week on Earth,

Troy Davis, who was executed

in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2011,

was put on ‘death watch’

to stop him taking his own life.

The Death House

at the State Prison

in Huntsville, Texas,

offers wheelchair access.

An estimated 150,000 people

die in the UK every year

because only 7% of Britons

know how to give first aid.

When a Navajo baby

laughs aloud for the first time,

the family throws a party.

The person who made the baby laugh

provides the food.

The air breathed by a single person

in an 80-year lifetime weighs more

than a fully laden Boeing 747.

1968

was the only year of the 20th century

in which no member

of the British armed services

was killed on active service.

The London Underground

has made more money from

its famous map

than it ever has from running trains.

In 2010, the Italian government

had a fleet of 629,000 official cars:

ten times as many

as the US government.

Since its discovery in 1930,

Pluto has travelled

only a third of its way

round the Sun.

Walter Schirra

is the only one

of the first six Americans in space

not to have one of the Tracy brothers

in Thunderbirds

named after him.

Sucking a king’s nipples

was a gesture of submission

in ancient Ireland.

In Vanuatu pidgin,

Prince Charles is known as

nambawan pikinini blong Missus Kwin

and a helicopter is a

mixmaster blong Jesus Christ.

In 1995,

the number of TV programmes in Britain

watched by over 15 million people

was 225.

By 2004, this had fallen to six.

In Romany, the word for television

is dínilo’s dikkaméngro or

‘fool’s looking-box’.

In the film industry, a ‘mickey’

is a gentle camera move forwards.

It’s short for ‘Mickey Rooney’

(a ‘little creep’).

Bacteria and amoebas

are far more different

from each other

than amoebas

are from people.

Two-thirds of all the people in the world

who have ever lived to be 65

are still alive today.

There are 10,000 times

as many photographs

on Facebook

as there are in the

US Library of Congress.

Eight of the Earth’s 88

naturally occurring chemical elements

were discovered

in the same mine in Sweden.

The Malay word

for water is

‘air’.

Kummerspeck (‘grief bacon’)

is German for the weight put on

from eating too much

when feeling sorry for yourself.

The Finnish word for pedant,

pilkunnussija,

translates literally as

‘comma fucker’.

When he died in 1891, John Davey,

a schoolmaster of Zennor, Cornwall,

was the only person in the world

that spoke Cornish.

He had kept the language alive

by talking to his cat.

The first Olympian

disqualified for banned substances

was Hans-Gunnar Liljenwall of Sweden.

In the 1968 Mexico Games,

he had two beers

to calm his nerves

before the pistol shooting.

The first recorded incidence of air rage

involved a passenger in First Class

who shat on the food trolley

after being refused another drink.

More than a third

of the world’s 43,794 airports

are in the USA.

The world’s largest cattle station,

Anna Creek Station in South Australia,

is larger than the state of Israel.

All ten species

of the most venomous snakes in the world

live in Australia.

Powerful acids

in snakes’ stomachs

mean they will explode

if given Alka-Seltzer.

The cost of fighting

a libel action in the UK

is 140 times greater

than the European average.

After the battle of Waterloo,

the Marquis of Anglesey

had his leg amputated.

It was buried

with full military honours

in a nearby garden.

Folk healers in the Andes

diagnose patients with guinea pigs,

which apparently squeak

when close to the source of the problem.

In 2003, six monkeys were funded

by the Arts Council of England

to see how long it would take them

to type the works of Shakespeare.

After six months, they had failed

to produce a single word of English,

broken the computer

and used the keyboard as a lavatory.

In 2001, seven Chilean poets held a reading

in the baboon enclosure of Santiago Zoo

to demonstrate that baboons

are more receptive to poetry

than the average Chilean.

By 2020, the number of men

of marriageable age in China

will outnumber the women

by 30 million.

Leo Tolstoy’s wife

wrote out the drafts of

War and Peace for him,

in longhand,

six times.

Zeus had five wives.

One of them was his aunt,

another was his elder sister

and a 3rd one he ate.

In 1672, an angry mob of Dutchmen

killed and ate their prime minister.

Half of the world’s

black pepper

is produced

in Vietnam.

Feeding canaries

red peppers

turns them

orange.

The name

Canary Islands

comes from the Latin for

‘Isle of Dogs’.

Cat originally meant ‘dog’.

The word comes from

the Latin catulus,

a small dog or puppy.

White rhinos

and black rhinos

are the same

colour.

Highways

in the western USA

are based on the

migratory routes

of bison.

The Alpine salamander’s pregnancy

can last for over three years.

Dragonflies

flap their wings

in a figure-of-eight motion.

In Bali, dragonflies are eaten with

coconut milk, ginger, garlic, shallots –

or just plain-grilled and crispy.

Salvador Dalí

was terrified of grasshoppers.

As a schoolboy, he threw such violent fits

of hysteria that his teacher forbade them

to be mentioned in class.

Kali is the Hindu goddess of

death, violence, sexuality

and

motherly love.

The name Mali

means ‘hippopotamus’

in Bamanankan,

the main language

of the country.

The Nigerian navy has four warships

whose names all mean ‘hippopotamus’

but in different local languages:

NNS Erinomi (hippo in Yoruba), NNS

Enyimiri (hippo in Igbo), NNS Dorina

(hippo in Hausa) and NNS Otobo (hippo in

Idoma, Ijaw, Igbani and Kalabari).

Over the years, the Royal Navy’s fleet

has included HMS Seagull, HMS Keith,

HMS Tortoise, HMS Wensleydale and

HMS Cockchafer.

A baby cockroach is called a ‘nymph’.

When Escoffier was head chef at the

Carlton Hotel in London, he got his

English clientele to eat frogs’ legs by

slipping them on to the menu as

Nymphs of the Dawn.

As a young man in London in 1914,

Ho Chi Minh

worked for Escoffier

as a trainee pastry chef.

The South American revolutionary

Simón Bolívar

was, at various times, president of

Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru

and Venezuela.

Venezuela

is Spanish for

‘Little Venice’.

In 17th-century Venice,

women’s high-heeled shoes

could be more than

12 inches tall.

Beckets n.

The little loops for a belt

on a pair of trousers

or a raincoat.

Callypygian adj.

Having

beautiful buttocks.

Misophonia n.

Irrational rage and terror

caused by the sound

of people eating.

Sciapodous adj.

Having feet

large enough

to be used as umbrellas.

The composer Arnold Schoenberg was

superstitious about the number 13.

As 7+6=13 he feared he would die aged 76.

And he did: on Friday 13th July,

at 13 minutes to midnight.

William Herschel, discoverer of Uranus,

lived to be 84 – the same number of years

that Uranus takes to orbit the Sun.

Asked by a priest, ‘Do you forgive your

enemies?’ the dying Spanish general

Ramón Blanco y Erenas (1833–1906)

answered, ‘No. I don’t have any enemies.

I’ve had them all shot.’

In 2007, a Bosnian called Amir Vehabovic

faked his own death to see

how many people would go to his funeral.

Only his mother turned up.

Baby koalas are weaned on their

mother’s excrement. It is consumed

directly from their mother’s bottom

in the form of ‘soup’.

In Antigua, lizard soup in considered

an effective cure for asthma –

provided the patient

isn’t told what’s in it.

The world’s largest known crocodile

and the world’s smallest man

are from the same island

in the Philippines.

The Aztecs sacrificed

1% of their population every year,

or about 250,000 people.

They also sacrificed eagles, jaguars,

butterflies and hummingbirds.

Hummingbirds

have 2,000 meals a day

and hibernate every night.

Seahorses

are the only fish with a neck

and the only family of animals

where the male

gives birth.

Crocodiles have no lips

and can hold their

breath for an hour.

The Cornish for ‘breath’

is anal.

Whenever the king of Swaziland

rises from his seat,

he must be greeted

with cheers and gasps

of astonished admiration.

In 1875, the king of Fiji

brought back measles

from a state visit to Australia

and wiped out

a quarter of his own people.

Queen Elizabeth I often drank

two pints of strong beer

for breakfast.

After weekend house parties at

Sandringham, King Edward VII

insisted on weighing his guests

to make sure they had eaten well.

Lithuanian men

are 200 times more likely

to kill themselves

than Jamaican men are.

Nigeria makes

more movies every year

than the US.

Only three members of the United

Nations have failed to ratify the

UN Convention on the Rights of the Child:

South Sudan, Somalia and the USA.

Only three places in the world

have ever changed from

driving on the right

to driving on the left:

East Timor (1975), Okinawa (1978)

and Samoa (2009).

Iceland was once called ‘Butterland’

because the grass was so rich

it seemed to drip butter.

After Switzerland, the world’s

largest per capita gold reserves

are held by Lebanon.

There are more than 35 places

called Lebanon in the USA and at least

38 Springfields. The Simpsons is based in

Springfield, Oregon.

This was kept quiet so viewers

would think it was

their own local Springfield.

Boots fitted with springs

were forbidden by

the original Queensberry Rules

for boxing.

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables

has a sentence that is 823 words long,

separated by 93 commas and

51 semicolons.

When Les Misérables was first published

in 1862, Hugo sent a snappish telegram

to his publisher to ask how it was selling.

The whole thing read, ‘?’

The publisher’s reply was effusive, ‘!’

Ernest Hemingway’s mother was so

ashamed of his novel The Sun Also Rises

that, when it was scheduled for discussion

at her book club, she refused to go.

Within 200 yards of the flat in Islington

where George Orwell had the idea for 1984,

there are now 32 CCTV cameras.

In 2008, an MI6 officer

appeared on The One Show.

Halfway through,

his moustache fell off.

Hitler’s press secretary didn’t approve

of his moustache. ‘Stop worrying about it,’

said the Führer. ‘If it’s not in fashion now,

it will be soon, because I’m wearing one.’

The shortest war ever fought was between

Britain and Zanzibar on 27th August 1896.

Zanzibar surrendered after 38 minutes.

When Rameses II’s mummified body

was shipped to France in 1974,

it was issued with a passport.

The mummy’s occupation was given as

‘King (deceased)’.

Barbara Cartland wrote over 600 books.

She dictated them to her secretary

between one o’clock and half past three

in the afternoon, lying on a sofa

with a white fur rug and

a hot-water bottle.

Barbara

is Latin for

‘strange woman’.

Barbara Windsor

is 4 feet 11 inches tall: the same height as

Joan of Arc and Queen Victoria.

In the 1930s, British women working

for Directory Enquiries were required

to be at least 5 feet 3 inches tall

so they could reach the

top of the switchboard.

Charles Dickens

invented 959 named characters.

Before deciding on the name Tiny Tim,

he considered Small Sam, Little Larry

and Puny Pete.

Dickens’ shortlist

for Martin Chuzzlewit’s surname

included Sweetledew, Chuzzletoe,

Sweetleback and

Sweetlewag.

John Steinbeck

used 300 pencils

to write his novel East of Eden.

The word pencil

comes from a Latin word meaning

‘small penis’.

When trying out a new pen,

97% of people

write their own name.

90% of everything

written in English

uses just 1,000 words.

20% of all road accidents

in Sweden

involve an elk.

12% of all the Coca-Cola

in America

is drunk at breakfast.

Gongoozler n.

One who stares for a long time

at things happening on a canal.

Gossypiboma n.

A surgical sponge

accidentally left inside

a patient’s body.

Jentacular adj.

Breakfasty; breakfastish;

of, or relating to, breakfast.

Meupareunia n.

Sexual activity enjoyed

by only one of the participants.

Gorillas

can be put on the pill.

The German for ‘contraceptive’ is

Schwangerschaftsverhütungsmittel.

By the time you’ve finished saying it,

it’s too late.

On 20th August 1949,

time appeared to stand still

for several minutes,

when hundreds of starlings roosted

on the long hand

of Big Ben.

The correct adjective

to describe a thrush is

turdoid.

If a silkworm

is exposed to pure carbon dioxide,

it crawls around aimlessly,

apparently trying to remember

what it’s supposed to be doing.

Eskimos use refrigerators

to stop their food from freezing.

The Sun’s core is so hot that

a piece of it the size of a pinhead

would give off enough heat

to kill a person 160 kilometres away.

Every living thing can be anaesthetised,

even plants. Despite their successful use

since the mid-19th century,

no one really understands

how anaesthetics work.

A trained typist’s fingers

cover about 16 miles a day.

Every US president with a beard

has been Republican.

The Bible

is the most shoplifted book

in the USA.

The world’s biggest frog

is bigger than

the world’s smallest antelope.

The dik-dik is a miniature antelope

that can go for months

without water

but dies after a week

without salt.

One third of all the salt produced in the US

is used to melt ice on roads.

British geologists have discovered

more of the world’s oil

than the geologists

of all the other nations

put together.

After being annexed

by the British Empire,

the sarong-clad Burmese

referred to their new overlords as

‘The Trouser People’.

Towards the end of each afternoon,

Sir Philip Sassoon (1888–1939)

hauled down the Union Jack

that flew over his house

in case the colours

clashed with

the sunset.

Half of Napoleon’s army

at the battle of Eylau – 30,000 men –

were burglars.

The penalty for adultery in ancient Greece

involved hammering a radish

into the adulterer’s bottom with a mallet.

Radishes were a lot longer

and pointier in those days.

An octopus can ooze through an opening

no bigger than its own eyeball.

Humans and elephants

are the only animals

with chins.

Sir Charles Isham,

a vegetarian spiritualist,

introduced garden gnomes

to England in 1847.

He hoped that they would attract

real gnomes to his garden.

Until the late 15th century,

the word ‘girl’ just meant a child.

Boys were referred to as ‘knave girls’

and female children were ‘gay girls’.

The use of the English word ‘gay’

to mean homosexual

is older than the use of the term

‘homosexual’ to mean gay.

The Serpentine in London was the first

man-made pond in the world

designed to look

as if it wasn’t

man-made.

Albanian has 27 words

for different kinds of moustache

and 30 for eyebrows.

In the 9th century,

Ireland was called ‘Scotia’ and

Scotland was known as ‘Albania’.

Six ten-billionths of the Sun is gold.

If the 1,200,000,000,000,000 tonnes of it

could be extracted,

there would be enough to gild Scotland

to the depth of half a mile.

Beavers have transparent eyelids so they

can see underwater with their eyes shut.

The Old Testament book of Leviticus

forbids the eating of cuckoos, ferrets,

camels, swans, crabs, frogs, chameleons,

eels, hares, snails, lizards, moles, ravens,

ospreys, vultures, lobsters, owls, storks,

herons, bats, ravens, pelicans, lapwings,

prawns and eagles.

1,000 baby eagles were eaten at

the Archbishop of York’s

enthronement feast in 1466.

Zeppo Marx, the youngest of the

Marx Brothers, designed the clamping

device that held the atom bombs in place

before they were dropped on

Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Oprah is ‘Harpo’ backwards.

Oprah Winfrey’s real name is Orpah

(after the sister of Ruth in the Bible)

but no one could say or spell it properly

so she eventually gave up

correcting them.

The flowers of the coffee bush

smell like jasmine.

Jasmine is a member of the olive family.

Marie is a member of the Osmond family.

Her first name is Olive.

In 1987, American Airlines saved $40,000

by removing an olive

from each salad

in First Class.

In an average year in Britain,

trousers cause

twice as many accidents

as chainsaws.

100,000 mobile phones

are dropped down the loo

in Britain every year,

and 50,000

get run over.

People are 1% shorter

in the evening

than they are

in the morning.

The Metropolitan Police

employs 39% more people

than the Royal Navy.

Cranberries bounce when ripe:

another name for them is ‘bounceberries’.

One that bounces seven times

is in perfect condition to eat.

Horripilation

is another word

for getting goosebumps.

The technical word

for a French kiss is

cataglottism.

Cockshut

is another word for twilight –

the time of day when chickens

are put to bed.

If all the time our eyes

are shut when blinking

is added together,

we spend 1.2 years

of our waking lives

in pitch darkness.

Every time a woodpecker’s beak

hits a tree, its head is subject to

1,000 times the force of gravity.

The smallest trees in the world

are the dwarf willows of Greenland.

They are two inches tall.

The world’s smallest test tube

has a diameter

10,000 times narrower

than a human hair.

Antarctic islands include

Disappointment Island, Fabulous Island,

Desolation Island, Monumental Island,

Inexpressible Island, Pourquoi Pas Island,

Shag Island, Circumcision Island and

Shoe Island.

In 2008, Usain Bolt

set the world record for the 100 metres

with one shoelace undone.

Every electron in the universe

knows about the state of

every other electron.

Honeybees

always know where the Sun is,

even if it’s

on the other side of the world.

The national anthem of Bangladesh

includes the lines:

‘The fragrance from your mango groves

Makes me wild with joy.’

One in three men in Britain

of Bangladeshi origin

works as a waiter.

Towels are a central part

of the culture in Belarus,

even appearing on the country’s flag.

At a traditional Belarusian wedding,

the bride walks to the church

dragging a towel.

13% of Belarus

is swamp.

In 2011, a 61-year-old woman

gave birth to her own grandson.

The baby was conceived with an egg

donated by her 35-year-old daughter.

The American Psychiatric Association

listed homosexuality

as a mental illness

until 1973.

Sudan is the only country

that still has crucifixion

as an official form

of capital punishment.

By the age of 18,

the average American child

will have seen 200,000

murders on television.

In German,

a Turnbeutelvergesser

is a boy who’s too weedy

for school sport and ‘forgets’

to bring his gym bag.

Schattenparker

is German for someone

who parks his car in the shade.

Depp

means ‘twit’

in German.

Thud!

the Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett,

is published in Germany as

Klonk!

The Basque word

for ‘cold’ is

hotz.

The Russian word

for ‘sock’ is pronounced

‘no sock’.

If you say the letters S.O.C.K.S

aloud in English, you will find yourself

pronouncing the Spanish for

‘it is what it is’

almost perfectly.

If you forget the tilde (~)

over an N when asking

how old someone is in Spanish,

you will end up asking them

how many anuses they have.

When Montenegro became

independent from Yugoslavia,

its Internet domain name went from being

.yu to .me

The Irish word leis (pronounced ‘lesh’)

has four different meanings.

Bhí leis leis leis leis means

‘His thigh was naked also’.

A bourdaloue was a gravy-boat-like

receptacle that ladies would squeeze

between their thighs

if they needed to urinate at court

in Georgian England.

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and

Donald Rumsfeld

all have slime-mold beetles

named after them.

Since 1700, new beetle species

have been discovered

at the rate of

one every six hours.

The short-circuit beetle is so named

because it eats the lead covering

of telephone cables.

Cartwrightia cartwrighti is a scarab beetle

described by Oscar L. Cartwright.

As you are not supposed to name

a species after yourself,

he claimed to have named it

after his brother.

Deathwatch beetles

attract mates

by repeatedly banging

their heads on the floor.

During his first teaching job in 1925,

Evelyn Waugh set out

to drown himself at sea,

but turned back

after being stung by a jellyfish.

The Irish name for jellyfish is

smugairle róin,

which literally translates as

‘seal’s snot’.

The French

for a walkie-talkie is

un talkie walkie.

The Eiffel Tower

has the same nickname

as Margaret Thatcher.

It’s known as La Dame de Fer

(‘The Iron Lady’).

Crime, disease and average

walking speed increase by 15%

as a city doubles in size.

People all over the world

are walking 10% faster

than they did a decade ago.

Airlines all over the world are flying

10% slower than they did in 1960

(to save on fuel costs).

As an apple falls to Earth,

the Earth falls very, very slightly

towards the apple.

Isaac Newton served as MP for Cambridge

but spoke in the House only once.

He asked for a window to be closed

because it was draughty.

Bram Stoker,

the author of Dracula,

married Oscar Wilde’s

first girlfriend.

Arthur Ransome,

author of Swallows and Amazons,

married Trotsky’s secretary.

Two-thirds of all the poetry

sold in the UK by living poets

is by Seamus Heaney.

The Slavonic name

for God is

Bog.

In 1568, the Catholic Church

condemned the entire population of

the Netherlands to death for heresy.

In the 1930s, the Rev. Frederick Densham

of Warleggan in Cornwall

alienated his flock by painting the church

blue and red, surrounding his rectory

with barbed wire and replacing

the congregation with

cardboard cut-outs.

Stalin had shamans

thrown out of helicopters

to give them a chance to

prove that they could fly.

It is most likely to be raining

at 7 a.m.

and least likely

at 3 a.m.

In Maori,

the word Maori

means ‘normal’.

Princess Anne

was the only woman

not to be gender-tested

at the 1976 Montreal Olympics.

Anne, Duc de Montmorency (1493–1567),

was a French general and politician.

He was named after his mother,

Anne Pot.

Pol Pot,

the Cambodian dictator

responsible for the deaths

of 21% of his country’s people,

was a former

geography teacher.

The Swahili word

for a coconut is

nazi.

‘Mother-in-law’

is an anagram of

‘Hitler woman’.

Both Stalin and Hans Christian Anderson

were the sons of a cobbler and a

washerwoman.

In 1187, as a symbol of unity

between their two countries,

Richard I of England

spent a night in the same bed

as Philip II of France.

In 1381, Richard II made Chelmsford

the capital of England

for one week.

In 1517, Richard Foxe,

the blind bishop of Winchester,

founded Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

On his first visit to the new college,

he was led twice round the main quad

to make it seem bigger than it really was.

In 1953, Keith Richards’ musical career

began as a choirboy

singing at the Queen’s coronation.

No male jaguar

has ever successfully mated

with a female tiger:

if it were to happen, the resulting animal

would be known as

a ‘jagger’.

Early draft names for

Walt Disney’s seven dwarfs included

Flabby, Dirty, Shifty,

Lazy, Burpy, Baldy

and Biggo-Ego.

Strictly speaking,

the plural of dwarf

is dwarrows.

In 2011, Toyota announced that

the official plural of Prius was

Prii.

Research using rabbits

has led to 26 Nobel Prizes

for Physiology or Medicine.

To process their food

with maximum efficiency,

rabbits swallow up to

80% of their own faeces.

The Sumatran rabbit

is so rare and shy

that the nearest humans

have no word for it in their language.

Bugs Bunny

is not a rabbit

but a hare.

The sloth is the only animal

named after one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

During the rainy season,

its metabolism slows down so much

that it can starve to death

on a full stomach.

Dolphins shed

the top layer of their skin

every two hours.

Paper can only be recycled six times.

After that, the fibres

are too weak to hold together.

A 2011 study by Nobel Economics laureate

Daniel Kahneman of 25 top Wall Street

traders found that they were

no more consistently successful

than a chimpanzee tossing a coin.

A 2011 study in the journal Psychology,

Crime and Law tested 39 British senior

managers and CEOs and found that they

had more psychopathic tendencies

than patients in Broadmoor.

Since 1980, the salaries of executives in

FTSE 100 companies have risen by 4,000%

compared to 300% for their employees.

An average pay rise of 50% in 2010

took the annual earnings of the directors

of Britain’s FTSE 100 companies

to £2.7 million each: over 100 times

the national average.

At the end of 2011,

the FTSE index stood at 5572:

1358 points lower

than it was at the end of 1999.

Google

was originally called

Back-Rub.

The acnestis

is the part of the back

that is impossible to scratch.

The most common treatment

for angina is

nitroglycerin.

It comes in pills, sprays or patches.

All Bran

is only

87% bran.

Malo kingi is a jellyfish

named after Robert King,

an American tourist

who died in Australia

after being stung by one.

The man after whom

Parkinson’s disease is named

was once arrested for plotting

to assassinate George III

with a poisoned dart.

The man after whom

Tourette’s Syndrome is named

was shot in the head

by one of his patients.

Spix’s macaw

is named after

the first man to shoot one.

Until 1857, it was legal for

British husbands to sell their wives.

The going rate was £3,000

(£23,000 in today’s money).

The most common reaction

from men confronted by

TV Licensing Enforcement Officers is,

‘I thought my wife

was dealing with it.’

King Herod’s first wife

was called Doris.

Thomas Edison

proposed to his second wife

in Morse code.

The first escalator was for fun,

rather than for practical purposes.

It was installed at Coney Island

in New York and ridden by 75,000 people

in its first two weeks.

Attendants bearing brandy and

smelling salts stood at the top of the first

escalator in Harrods, to revive shoppers

who became light-headed on the ride.

At least one person a week in the UK

changes their middle name

to ‘Danger’ by deed poll.

If all the British Empire’s dead of the

First World War were to march

four abreast down Whitehall, it would

take them almost four days and nights

to pass the Cenotaph.

At the age of 19, J. S. Bach

walked 420 miles to see

a performance by the composer

Buxtehude.

To chork

is to make a noise like feet

walking in waterlogged shoes.

J’ai des rossignols

(‘I’ve got nightingales’)

is French for

unexplained noises

coming from a car.

250,000 birds were killed

by the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989.

About the same number die

from crashing into window glass

in the US every day.

Only half the passengers and crew

who reached America on the Mayflower

in November 1621

survived until the following spring.

Two-thirds of the world’s caviar

is eaten aboard

the QE2.

There are 35,112 golf courses

in the world,

half of them in the USA.

All the world’s golf courses put together

cover more land area

than the Bahamas.

The land around the Iron Curtain

lay untouched for decades. In 1989,

it was turned into a nature reserve

1,400 kilometres long, but less than

200 metres wide.

Victorian guidebooks advised women

to put pins in their mouths

to avoid being kissed in the dark

when trains went through tunnels.

Beekeeping is illegal under the

New York City Health Code,

because bees are

‘naturally inclined to do harm’.

Herring talk out of their arses,

communicating by firing bubbles from

their backsides that sound like

high-pitched raspberries.

The filament of the first

commercial light bulb,

patented by Thomas Edison in 1880,

was made of bamboo.

The tall chef ’s hat or toque blanche

traditionally had a hundred pleats

to represent the number of ways

an egg could be cooked.

It was once suggested that

New York should be called Brimaquonx,

combining the names

of all the city’s boroughs –

Brooklyn, Staten Island, Manhattan,

Queens and Bronx –

into one.

Tibet has a smaller GDP than Malta,

but is 4,000 times its size.

Hamesucken

is the crime of assaulting someone

in their own home.

Hapax legomenon

describes a word or phrase

that has only been used once.

Haptodysphoria

is the feeling you get from

running your nails

down a blackboard.

Hydrophobophobia

is the fear of

hydrophobia.

Women buy

85% of the world’s Valentine cards and

96% of all the candles

in America.

Einstein

gave his $32,000 Nobel Prize money to

his first wife, Mileva,

as part of their divorce settlement.

The best-selling work of fiction

of the 15th century was

The Tale of the Two Lovers,

an erotic novel by the man who later

became Pope Pius II.

Tiramisu

means ‘pick me up’

in Italian.

The names of the English rivers

Amber, Avon, Axe, Esk, Exe, Ouse,

Humber, Irwell, Thames and Tyne

all mean ‘river’ or ‘water’

in various ancient languages.

There are no rivers

in Saudi Arabia.

The Onyx River

is the only river in Antarctica.

It flows for just 60 days a year

in high summer.

The river with the largest

discharge volume

in Albania is the Seman.

About 100 miles north of the Seman

is the small town of

Puke.

The gold medals at London 2012

were the largest and heaviest

ever awarded at a Summer Olympics,

but are only 1.34% gold.

In 1979, the Uruguayan footballer

Daniel Allende transferred

from Central Español to Rentistas

for a fee of 550 beefsteaks,

to be paid in instalments

of 25 steaks a week.

In 1937, Gillingham FC

sold one of their players to Aston Villa for

three second-hand turnstiles,

two goalkeepers’ sweaters, three cans of

weed-killer and an old typewriter.

Typewriters used to be known as

‘literary pianos’.

The raw materials needed to make a

desktop computer, including

530 lb of fossil fuels,

50 lb of chemicals and

3,330 lb of water,

weigh two tons:

about the same as a rhinoceros.

Exocet is French for

‘flying fish’.

Ancient Scandinavians

believed that the Aurora Borealis was

the result of huge shoals of herring

reflecting light into the sky.

The word ‘döner’

in döner kebab

is Turkish for

‘rotating’.

Woodrow Wilson

kept a flock of sheep

on the White House lawn.

He sold the wool and gave the money

to the Red Cross.

Bill Clinton

was mauled by a sheep

at the age of eight and didn’t learn

to ride a bicycle till he was 22.

Before signing the trade embargo

against Cuba, John F. Kennedy

got his press secretary to buy him

1,000 Cuban cigars.

Ronald Reagan’s pet name for

Nancy Reagan was

‘Mommy Poo Pants’.

After George W. Bush

was re-elected president in 2004,

the number of calls from US citizens

to the Canadian Immigration authorities

jumped from 20,000 to 115,000 a day.

One of the main contributors

to the original Oxford English Dictionary

cut off his penis in a fit of madness.

The longest palindrome in the

Oxford English Dictionary is ‘tattarrattat’.

James Joyce used it in Ulysses:

‘I knew his tattarrattat at the door.’

The longest palindrome written by one

poet about another is W. H. Auden’s:

‘T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang

emanating, is sad. I’d assign it a name:

Gnat dirt upset on drab pot toilet.’

James Joyce

married a woman called Nora Barnacle.

She once said to him,

‘Why don’t you write books

people can read?’

During rehearsals for Peter Pan,

J. M. Barrie ordered Brussels sprouts

every day for lunch, but never ate them.

When asked why, he said:

‘I cannot resist ordering them.

The words are so lovely to say.’

Botanists

cannot tell the difference

between broccoli and cauliflower.

Rhubarb

is a vegetable.

Some species of scorpion

survive on one meal

a year.

The Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul

has only 5% of the country’s population

but provides 70% of its fashion models.

The trap-jaw ant

has the fastest bite in the world:

its jaws close 2,300 times faster

than a blink of an eye.

The statue of Winston Churchill

in Parliament Square is electrified

to stop pigeons perching

on its head.

In Bolivia,

the Quechua word for ‘baby’ is

guagua –

pronounced ‘wah wah’.

A baby echidna

is called

a ‘puggle’.

Baby puffins

are called

‘pufflings’.

Baby hedgehogs

are called

‘hoglets’.

In 19th-century Britain,

‘mock-turtle’ soup was often

made from cow foetuses.

Dogs can smell where electric current

has been and human fingerprints

that are a week old.

Lord Byron’s mail often contained

locks of hair from adoring female fans.

Some of the clippings he sent them

in return actually came from

his pet Newfoundland dog,

Boatswain.

As soon as Lord Byron left England

for the last time in 1816, his creditors

entered his home and repossessed

everything he owned, right down to his

tame squirrel.

In 1899, Dr Horace Emmett

announced that the secret

of eternal youth was injections

of ground-up squirrel testicles.

He died later the same year.

Squirrels

can remember the hiding places

of up to 10,000 nuts.

More than 10,000 seashells

had to be crushed to make

the purple dye to colour

a single Roman toga.

The Latin verb

manicare

means

‘to come in the morning’.

In the novel that the film Pinocchio

was based on, Jiminy Cricket

was brutally murdered and

Pinocchio had his feet burned off and

was hanged by villagers.

Donald Duck’s

voice started out

as an attempt to do

an impression

of a lamb.

Red Bull

is illegal in Norway, Denmark,

Uruguay and Iceland.

Sitting Bull

was originally called

Jumping Badger.

When Fidel Castro

seized power in Cuba,

he ordered all Monopoly sets

to be destroyed.

The human body grows fastest

during its few first weeks in the womb.

If it were to keep growing

at the same rate for 50 years,

it would be bigger than

Mount Everest.

To produce beef

takes 16,000 times its own weight

in water.

The Turkish for ‘cannibal’

is yamyam.

On 30th June 1998, England lost to

Argentina in a World Cup penalty

shoot-out. On that day, and for two days

afterwards, the number of heart attacks

in England increased by 25%.

The first violence of the French Revolution

took place at a luxury wallpaper factory.

In 1811, crimes punishable by death

in Britain included sheep stealing,

impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner,

‘strong evidence of malice’ in children

aged 7–14, living with gypsies for a month

and stealing cheese.

In 2011,

cheese was the

most stolen food

in the world.

Buzz Aldrin’s

mother’s maiden name

was Moon.

Fritinancy

is the buzzing of insects.

Most bees buzz in the key of A,

unless they are tired,

when they buzz in the key of E.

British moths include

the Uncertain, the Confused, the Magpie,

the Lackey, the Drinker, the Streak,

the Ruddy Highflyer, the Buff Arches,

the Figure of Eighty, the Anomalous, the

Dark Dagger, the Lettuce Shark,

the Isabelline Tiger, the Waved Tabby

and the Mother Shipton.

The cake

for the Queen Mother’s wedding

in 1923 weighed

half a ton.

The three

most searched-for individuals

in the Nobel Peace Prize

nomination database are

Mahatma Gandhi, Joseph Stalin

and Adolf Hitler.

A corpocracy

is a society ruled by corporations;

a coprocracy is one ruled by shits.

The first mobile phones

cost £2,000 each and

had a battery life of

about 20 minutes.

The world’s first weather map,

published in The Times on 1st April 1875,

gave the weather for

the previous day.

During the First World War,

explosions from the battle of the Somme

could be heard on Hampstead Heath.

Handschuhschneeballwerfer is German slang

for ‘coward’. It means someone who

wears gloves to throw snowballs.

Two French kings were killed by tennis:

King Louis X (1289–1316) caught a

fatal chill after one game and

Charles VIII (1470–98) never recovered

from a coma after another one. He had

banged his head on the door lintel

on the way into the match.

Humans kill

at least 100 million sharks a year,

or about 11,000 an hour.

Female aphids give birth

to other live female aphids that are

already pregnant with yet more

female aphids.

A flock of snipe

is known as a ‘wisp’.

The bee hummingbird

is the world’s smallest bird.

It weighs about as much

as a tea bag.

John Ainsworth Horrocks (1818–46),

who introduced camels to Australia,

was also accidentally shot by one.

He died of gangrene a month later,

but had the camel executed first.

The Czech general Jan Zizka ordered

his skin to be turned into a war drum

after his death. It was beaten at times of

national emergency, such as the outbreak

of the Thirty Years War in 1618.

George Kakoma, the composer of

Uganda’s national anthem, sued his

government for lost royalties in 1962.

He won the case and was paid 2,000

Ugandan shillings, equivalent to 50p.

A ‘jackstraw’ is a 16th-century word for a

person of no substance or worth.

A boar produces 200 ml of semen

each time it ejaculates,

compared to

a man’s 3 ml.

King George III’s urine

was blue.

The most times a person

has been stung by bees

without dying is 2,443.

A ‘conscientious objector’

was originally one who

refused to have their children inoculated.

Skiing

was introduced to Switzerland

by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

in 1893.

Nelson Mandela

was not removed from

the US terror watch list

until 2008.

The polar explorers

Roald Amundsen and Ernest Shackleton

both explored

in Burberry.

Two-thirds

of the world’s population

has never seen snow.

The French for candyfloss is

barbe à papa

(dad’s beard).

The Hebrew for candyfloss is

searot savta

(grandma’s hair).

The Afrikaans for candyfloss is

spookasem

(ghost breath).

Moer-my gesig is Afrikaans for

‘a face you want to punch’.

Before he became prime minister of

Australia in 1983, Bob Hawke got into

the 1954 Guinness Book of Records

for drinking two and a half pints of beer

in 11 seconds.

11 of the 12 men

to have walked on the Moon

were in the Boy Scouts.

In 1937, comic acrobat Joseph Späh

survived the Hindenburg airship disaster

by jumping out of the window.

The French for

‘window-shopping’

is faire du leche-vitrines or

‘window-licking’.

France has 36,782 mayors,

five of whom are mayors of villages

that ceased to exist 92 years ago.

In 1992, the rules governing what the

French may legally christen their children

were relaxed. The following year,

the most popular name for baby boys

was ‘Kevin’.

The French philosopher Voltaire’s

explanation for why the fossils of

seashells are found on mountaintops was

that they had been left there by ancient

picnickers with a taste for seafood.

The French mathematician Descartes

had a theory that monkeys and apes

were able to talk – but kept quiet

in case they were asked to do any work.

Work

is three times more dangerous

than war.

A single human male

produces enough sperm in a fortnight

to impregnate every fertile woman

on the planet.

None of the best-known

English swear words

are of Anglo-Saxon origin.

Under the provisions of the

1912 Scottish Protection of Animals Act,

the Loch Ness monster

is a protected species.

Before they were famous,

Clive James and Sylvester Stallone

had jobs cleaning out lion cages.

Eric Clapton and Jack Nicholson

grew up believing their grandmothers

were their mothers and their mothers

were their sisters.

Olivia Newton-John

was president of

the Isle of Man Basking Shark Society.

John Cleese, Michael Caine and Marc Bolan

all bought Rolls-Royces

before they could drive.

The last words of Henry Royce,

co-founder of Rolls-Royce, were:

‘I wish I’d spent more time

in the office.’

When The Office first aired in 2007,

it had the second-lowest audience

appreciation score on the BBC

after Women’s Bowls.

When Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour

began in 1946, it had a male host.

Early items included

‘Cooking with Whale Meat’ and

‘I Married a Lion-tamer’.

‘Broadcasting’ comes from farming –

it originally meant scattering

seeds across a field.

Scolding and eavesdropping

were illegal in England

until 1967.

Abortion was illegal in the UK

for only 164 years,

between 1803 and 1967.

To avoid being caught on film

by a speed camera,

you would have

to be travelling at

28,000 miles per hour.

In 1999, a gang of thieves

was forced to do community service

along a road in Rotherham.

The next spring the daffodils

coming into bloom spelt out the words

‘shag’ and ‘bollocks’.

A williwaw

is a sudden gust of wind

coming off a high plateau.

Mollynogging

is an old Lincolnshire word

for hanging out

with loose women.

Areodjarekput

is an Inuit word meaning

‘to exchange wives

for a few days only’.

A special bastard

is someone born out of wedlock

whose parents later married.

Although they didn’t meet

until they were teenagers,

Prince Albert and Queen Victoria

were born in the same year

and delivered by the same midwife.

The average human being

gets through 900 skins in a lifetime.

The air in an average-sized room

weighs about 100 pounds.

The US navy

has more aircraft carriers

than all the other navies

of the world combined.

An animal the size of an elephant

could evolve to an animal the size of

a sheep in 100,000 generations,

but for an animal the size of a sheep

to evolve to the size of an elephant

would take 1.6 million generations.

After a meal,

a Burmese python’s heart

grows by 40%.

Squid travel faster

when they jump through the air

than they do under water.

Lava can flow

as fast as

a sprinting greyhound.

If melted down for scrap,

a bronze medal from London 2012

would be worth less than £3.

In 2008, archaeologists in Cyprus

found a 7th-century curse

inscribed on a lead tablet that said,

‘May your penis hurt when you make love.’

Nobody knows who made the curse,

or why.

The Malleus Maleficarum, a 15th-century

treatise on witchcraft, warned that

witches stole men’s penises

and kept them in birds’ nests.

The average person in the UK

talks about the weather

44 times a month to

18 other people.

The average Briton

suffers from 9,672 minor injuries

over the course of a 78-year lifespan.

The National Health Service

is the world’s 4th-largest employer

after the US Defense Department,

the Chinese Red Army

and Walmart.

The NHS has halved superbug deaths

and saved 10,000 lives

in the last four years simply

by getting doctors and nurses

to wash their hands.

If everyone in the world

washed their hands properly,

a million lives

could be saved a year.

Mundungus n.

The stench of tobacco.

Quaquaversal adj.

Going off in all directions.

Pixilated adj.

Slightly mad or confused,

having been led astray by pixies.

Rasceta n.

The creases

on the inside of the wrist.

The first commercial chewing gum

appeared in 1871, after Thomas Adams

had failed to make car tyres from

the same ingredients.

The first chewing gum made by

William Wrigley Jr (in 1892)

was given away free

with his baking powder.

Lilt, the soft drink with the

‘totally tropical taste’,

is completely unknown in the Caribbean.

Before the Queen puts her shoes on,

a member of the royal household

wears them first

to make sure they are comfortable.

Spiders are extremely carnivorous.

10,000 spiders sealed in a room

will eventually result in

one enormously fat spider.

Americans eat 500 million pounds

of peanut butter a year,

enough to coat the floor

of the Grand Canyon.

Every month in the Netherlands,

133 billion insects are killed

colliding into cars.

Once a year, on 22nd August,

Prince Hans-Adam II,

the ruler of Liechtenstein,

invites the whole country

to a party at his house.

In online dating sites

you are more likely to come across

a teacher or lecturer

than someone from any other profession.

Since 1959, it has been legal

to marry a dead person in France,

providing you can prove the wedding

was already planned.

Warmduscher

is German for ‘wimp’:

a person so pathetic

he only takes hot showers.

A survey of

a working-class area of London in 1915

found only 12 houses with baths.

Nine of them were being used

for storage.

One third of patent applications

in America in 1905 were

related in some way to the bicycle.

Every year, a thousand letters

arrive in Jerusalem addressed to God.

In 2009, a retired policeman called

Geraint Woolford was admitted to

Abergale Hospital in north Wales

and ended up next to another retired

policeman called Geraint Woolford.

The men weren’t related, had never met

and were the only two people in the UK

called Geraint Woolford.

Geraint is the only word spoken

in England and Wales that rhymes with

‘pint’ – though in Scotland you might hear

‘behint’ (Scots for ‘behind’).

There are two rhymes in English

for purple: curple, a strap passing

under a horse’s tail, and hirple,

to walk along dragging

one leg behind the other.

The African giant pouched rat

can smell tuberculosis 50 times faster

than a laboratory scientist

can identify it.

Electrons move

along an electricity cable

about as fast as

honey flows.

80% of people

who die from anorexia

are aged at least 45.

A red blood cell

can make a complete circuit

of your body in 20 seconds.

If your stomach acid

got on to your skin

it would burn

a hole in it.

A pumping human heart

can squirt blood

a distance of

30 feet.

When we blush,

our stomach lining goes red too.

Christopher Columbus

suffered from arthritis in his wrist

as a result of a bacterial infection

caught from a parrot.

John Wayne

once won Lassie the Dog

in a game of poker.

The founder of match.com,

Gary Kremen, lost his girlfriend

to a man she met on

match.com.

At Ronnie Barker’s memorial service

in Westminster Abbey in 2006,

four candles were carried

instead of the usual two.

Despite playing the Fonz

for ten years in the sitcom Happy Days,

Henry Winkler never learned

to ride a motorcycle.

The maize needed

to fill a single Range Rover’s

petrol tank with biofuel

would feed a person

for a whole year.

J. R. R. Tolkien

typed the 1,200-page manuscript of

The Lord of the Rings trilogy

with two fingers.

Quantophrenia

is an obsessive reliance

on statistics.

The first published crossword

was called a word-cross.

The hand jive was invented

at the Cat’s Whiskers club in Soho.

The premises were so small and cramped

that there was only enough room

for people to dance with their hands.

Feeding curry to a sheep

reduces the amount of

methane in its farts

by up to 40%.

More than half the trash

collected on the summit of Ben Nevis

is banana peel.

You could listen to a radio on the Moon

but it’s virtually impossible

aboard a submarine.

Radio waves travel

much more easily through space

than through water.

Areas of the Moon include

the Ocean of Storms,

the Marsh of Decay

and the Lake of Death.

By law, buskers in Dublin

must have a repertoire of

at least 20 songs.

The opposite of plankton is nekton –

creatures that move through water

at will, rather than merely drifting.

Fish, dolphins and humans are nekton.

When John Hetherington

ventured out in public

wearing the first top hat,

it was considered so shocking that

children screamed, women fainted

and a small boy broke his arm

in the chaos.

In October 2008,

inflation in Zimbabwe

reached 231,000,000%.

The average car in Britain is parked

for 96% of the time.

Casanova

was a librarian.

India has almost 155,000 post offices:

more than any country in the world

and almost twice as many as China.

Chess, Ludo and Snakes and Ladders

were all invented in ancient India.

Snakes and Ladders was called

Moksha Patam – ‘the path to liberation’.

South-east England

has a lower annual rainfall

than Jerusalem or Beirut.

50 to 100 people kill themselves

on the London Underground each year,

but official records state that

only three babies

have ever been born there,

in 1924, 2008 and 2009.

Women make

25% of the films in Iran,

compared to

4% in the US.

By 2025, there will be more

English speakers in China

than in the rest of the world put together

A new skyscraper

is built in China every five days.

By 2016, there will be four times as many

as in the whole of the US.

The electrical energy

that powers each cell in our bodies

works out at 30 million volts per metre,

the equivalent voltage

of a bolt of lightning.

The Netherlands

exports more soy sauce

than Japan.

Tokyo

has three times as many

Michelin-starred restaurants

as Paris.

Bricklehampton

is the longest place name in the UK

with no repeated letters.

A vulture can safely swallow

enough botulinum toxin

to kill 300,000 guinea pigs.

More than seven times

as many people in the UK

visit museums and galleries every year

as attend Premier League football games.

Manchester United

is the most hated brand in Britain

and the 7th most hated in the world.

Angola has the world’s best record

at football penalty shoot-outs.

They have never lost one.

Ants nod to each other

as they pass.

The Swiss

own more guns per head

than the Iraqis.

Saudi women

have won the right to vote,

but not the right

to drive to the polling station.

In Norway, ‘Odd’ and ‘Even’

are common male first names.

You can even (oddly)

have ‘Odd-Even’.

Richard the Lionheart’s

younger brother, John,

was nicknamed ‘Dollheart’.

A smellsmock is a priest

who indulges in extra-curricular

activities with his flock.

Japanese sheep go

‘meh’.

Gymnophoria

is the sense that someone is

mentally undressing you.

A gynotikilobomassophile

is one who loves to

nibble women’s earlobes.

The Afrikaans

for an elephant’s trunk is

slurp.

Brenda

means ‘inside’

in Albanian.

Baghdad means

‘God’s gift’

in Persian.

The first man to use the word

‘bored’

was Lord Byron in 1823.

The world’s oldest living thing

is a patch of Mediterranean sea-grass

between Spain and Cyprus.

It is estimated to be 200,000 years old.

The word

Twinings

in the tea company’s

original 300-year-old typeface

is the oldest continuously used

commercial logo in existence.

Every time he made a cup of coffee,

Beethoven counted out exactly 60 beans

to make sure it was always

exactly the same strength.

A female chimpanzee

in a fit of passion has the

strength of six men.

Higgs bosons,

assuming they exist at all,

exist for approximately

one zeptosecond –

a thousandth of a billionth

of a billionth of a second.

The Hundred Years War

lasted for

116 years.

There are more pigs in China

than in the next

43 pork-producing countries combined.

Some pigs suffer from

mysophobia,

the fear of mud.

Tyrosemiophile n.

One who collects

cheese labels.

Ultracrepidarian n.

Someone who doesn’t know

what they’re talking about.

Zemblanity n.

Bad luck occurring

just as expected:

the opposite of serendipity.

Zinzulation n.

The sound made

by power saws.

The seven years’ preparation

for the 2008 Beijing Olympics

reduced unemployment in the city to zero

and increased the average income by 89.9%.

Many of the doves

released at the opening ceremony

of the 1988 Seoul Olympics

were accidentally roasted alive

when the Olympic flame was lit.

More than 50% of Team GB’s medals

in the 2012 London Olympics were won

in sports where the athlete is

sitting down or kneeling.

At the 2012 London Olympics,

which lasted for 17 days, the athletes were

provided with 150,000 free condoms –

approximately 15 each.

British troops in India

during the Second World War were issued

with the memorable advice:

‘Defeat the Axis,

Use Prophylaxis’.

In 1951, more than 200 British MPs

were voted in by over 50%

of their electorate.

In 2001, none were.

99% of all the words in the

Oxford English Dictionary

do not derive from Old English,

but 60% of the most

commonly used words do.

Francach is an Irish word

that means both ‘rat’ and ‘Frenchman’.

Argentine scientists have discovered

that giving hamsters Viagra

helps them recover from jet lag

up to 50% faster.

To dringle

is to waste time

in a lazy manner.

The UK is the fattest nation

in the European Union

and the 28th-fattest in the world.

The USA is the 9th-fattest nation

in the world. Eight of the top ten

are Pacific island nations, led by

Nauru, Micronesia and the Cook Islands.

The 1 million inhabitants of the

Chinese city of Zhuji make 8 billion

pairs of socks a year:

35% of total worldwide

sock production.

In Italy, 13

is not an unlucky number,

but 17 is.

Kailash Singh of India stopped

washing after his wedding 38 years ago,

hoping it would help him to have a son.

To date, he has seven daughters.

Schimpf-los is a 24-hour German hotline

that allows customers to

release pent-up aggression by

swearing at telephone operators.

Chamois can

balance on a ledge

less than two inches wide.

Three-quarters of the French

take their annual holiday

in France.

The huge gong

that was struck before Rank films

was made of papier mâché.

To ‘baffle’ someone

once meant to subject them

to public disgrace

by hanging their picture

upside down.

Edward Elgar (1857–1934)

is the only major composer

to have mastered

the bassoon.

The Wars of the Roses

weren’t called that.

Sir Walter Scott invented the name

four centuries after the conflict.

A walleteer

is an indispensable word

for someone who has a wallet.

Before becoming an artist,

Magritte was a professional

wallpaper designer.

The playwright

Tennessee Williams (1911–83)

choked to death

on a bottle cap.

If the mass in a one-kilogram bag of sugar

could be converted into energy,

it would be enough to drive a car

non-stop for 100,000 years.

There were no recorded boxing matches

anywhere in the world

between the fall of the Roman Empire

and 1681.

Only three

of the original 60 clauses

of Magna Carta

are still in force.

The soldiers of Edward III

dressed up as swans for banquets.

The king himself came

as a pheasant.

The EU

spends over a billion Euros a year

on translation.

A third of the 250 Americans

who catch leprosy every year

get it from

armadillos.

90% of the bullets

bought by the Ministry of Defence

are used for training purposes.

The number of ten-year-olds

in Britain who hold

legal shotgun licences

is 26.

More than a third

of the world’s smokers

are Chinese.

A lethal dose of caffeine

is about 50 double espressos.

Red Bull

was originally called

Red Water Buffalo.

President Obama’s secret-service nickname

is ‘Renegade’. Ronald Reagan’s nickname

was ‘Rawhide’, Bill Clinton’s was ‘Eagle’

and George W. Bush was known as

‘Trailblazer’.

MI5 used to own special kettles

that it kept specifically for

steaming open envelopes.

Sitting in a 15-minute meeting

uses more energy

than Usain Bolt expends

over three 100-metre sprints.

Almost any domestic cat

can run faster than

Usain Bolt.

Over a distance of about a mile,

a carrier pigeon

is faster than a fax machine.

Modern homing pigeons

find it more convenient to

follow motorways and ring roads

and turn left and right at junctions

rather than using their

in-built navigational abilities.

Brazil nuts are so radioactive

that a pocketful will set off the alarm

at a nuclear power station.

The Oxford English Dictionary

takes 9,000 words to describe

the 45 different meanings

of ‘at’.

A male rhinoceros beetle

can lift 850 times

its own body weight.

Alan Turing,

the father of computer science,

chained his mug to a radiator

to stop anyone else at work from using it.

The proud owner

of the first silicone breast implant

was a dog called Esmeralda.

There are only

two beret factories

left in France.

In 1367, King Charles V of France

explicitly banned the wearing

of shoes shaped like penises.

In 2008, pet hamsters

were banned in Vietnam.

Monty Python’s Life of Brian

was marketed in Sweden as

‘The film that’s so funny,

it was banned in Norway.’

The banning of the fez

in Turkey in 1925

led to riots, executions

and a thriving fez-smuggling trade.

The Turkish

for ‘ski’ is

kayak.

Dalek

is Croatian for

‘far-away thing’.

Smegma

is Latin for

‘detergent’.

The Afrikaans

for ‘astrology’ is

sterrewiggelary.

Theoretically the Pope can resign

but, since he is the Supreme Pontiff,

there is no one qualified

to accept his resignation.

Vatican City

is the only place in the world

where cash machines

offer instructions in Latin.

Since the Second World War,

only 20 babies born in the UK

have been called Adolf.

The ‘G-spot’ was nearly called

the Whipple Tickle –

after Professor Beverley Whipple,

who coined the expression

that we know today.

Cow’s hooves

are used to make

the foam in fire extinguishers.

The first potatoes

introduced to Britain

were used to make desserts.

In 1976,

one person in the USA

was killed by an outbreak of swine flu,

but the vaccine introduced to combat it

killed 25.

There are 1,000 times

as many bacteria

in your gut

as there are stars

in the Milky Way.

Bacteria

are about as different

from viruses as

metronomes are

from giraffes.

Most antibiotics

are made from bacteria.

Bacteria

can get viruses.

Viruses can get viruses.

A new one recently discovered

in a French cooling tower

was found to be infected

by another, smaller one.

Scallops

have up to 100 eyes.

The praying mantis

has only one ear,

which is located

between its legs.

Until the 19th century

the English word

for actors was

‘hypocrites’.

The Japanese

for ‘handbag’ is

handubagu.

In 1947, the Duke of Windsor

bought the Duchess of Windsor

a black patent leather

Hermès wheelbarrow.

In 1915, the lock millionaire Cecil Chubb

bought his wife Stonehenge.

She didn’t like it,

so in 1918 he gave it to the nation.

Since 1815, Belgium has paid

the Duke of Wellington’s family

more than $46 million

as a reward for winning

the battle of Waterloo.

The First World War

officially ended on

3rd October 2010.

Wars kill more civilians

than soldiers: in a war,

the safest place to be

is usually in the army.

The world’s worst maritime disaster

was the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff

by a Soviet submarine in 1945,

with the loss of 9,343 lives.

35 years after leaving school,

the majority of people

can still identify

90% of their classmates.

The speed of the wind

has fallen

by 60%

in the last

30 years.

Half of all the species

in the world live in

the rainforest canopy.

The human brain

is more complex

than an exploding star

or the US economy.

Every day,

plants convert

sunlight into energy

equivalent to six times

the entire power consumption of

human civilisation.

For a million years,

the human population of the Earth

was less than 26,000.

The last two speakers

of the Mexican language Zoque

are both in their seventies

and refuse to speak to one another.

More than one in five Americans

believes that the world will

end in their lifetime.

Thomas Edison’s last breath

is held in a vial

at the Henry Ford museum in Detroit.

99% of all the species

that have ever lived

are now extinct.

Tasting Notes

Anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.

T. H. HUXLEY (1825–1895)

This book is rather like a whisky still – an immense amount of malted barley, water and smoke have gone in at the top to produce the slow drip of concentrated liquor at the bottom. Feeding that still, alongside the three of us, have been the matchless team of QI Elves led by Bo’sun Justin Pollard and Piers ‘Flash’ Fletcher. Andrew Murray, Anne Miller and Alex Bell have done most of the heavy lifting. Will Bowen, Molly Oldfield, Chris Gray, Rob Blake, Jenny Doughty and Liz Townsend pitched in at key points and Sarah Lloyd’s careful management made sure we ended up with cask-strength single malt and not a cheap supermarket blend.

Once again the Faber team of Stephen Page, Julian Loose, Eleanor Crow, Paula Turner and Dave Watkins proved they are the best in the business.

Now its over to you. The sources for each fact can be found online at www.qi.com/1227. Please do let us know if you have a quibble or a correction. And add your own discoveries via our Twitter account @qikipedia. As Mark Twain once reminded us:

Get your facts first, and then

you can distort them

as much as you please.

Index

This is here to help you find your favourite bits. Like the facts themselves, we’ve kept it as simple as we can. The rule is: each entry has only one word.

If you can’t find ‘polar bears’ try ‘bears’; for ‘Adam’s apple’ try ‘apple’ or ‘Adam’s’ and so on. Capital letters at the start of an entry indicate a proper noun or name – ‘bugs’ are insects and ‘Bugs’ is the Bunny.

007 1; 3-D 2; 7-Up 3

Abercrombie 1;

Aborigine 1;

abortion 1;

accidents 1, 2, 3, 4;

accountants 1;

acrobat 1;

actors 1, 2;

Adams 1, 2, 3;

adoptions 1;

adrenaline 1;

adultery 1;

advertising 1, 2;

Aerosmith 1;

Afghanistan 1, 2;

aid 1;

airports 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

Albania 1, 2;

Albanian 1, 2;

alcohol 1;

Aldrin 1;

Alexanders 1, 2;

aliens 1;

Alka-Seltzer 1;

allergies 1;

amoebas 1;

anaesthetics 1;

angina 1;

Anglo-Saxon 1;

Annes 1;

anorexia 1;

anteaters 1;

antelopes 1, 2;

anthems 1, 2, 3;

anthropologists 1;

Antigua 1;

ants 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

anuses 1, 2;

apartments 1;

apes 1, 2;

aphids 1;

Apollo 1, 2;

apples 1, 2;

Apple 1, 2;

Arabic 1, 2;

archbishops 1, 2;

Archimedes 1;

armadillos 1;

arsehole 1;

arses 1, 2, 3;

arthritis 1, 2;

Arthurs 1, 2;

aspirin 1;

asteroids 1, 2;

asthma 1;

astrology 1;

astronauts 1, 2;

atoms 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

Aurora 1;

Austrian 1, 2;

awning 1;

Aztecs 1

babies 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 13, 14;

baboons 1;

Bach 1;

bacon 1;

bacteria 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

badgers 1, 2, 3;

baking 1;

balloons 1;

bananas 1, 2;

bands 1;

Bang 1;

banging 1, 2;

Bangladesh 1;

banks 1, 2, 3;

bans 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

barley 1;

barn 1;

barnacle 1;

Barnacle 1;

baseball 1;

basketball 1;

bassoon 1;

bastards 1, 2;

bats 1, 2;

baths 1;

bathwater 1;

battles 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

BBC 1, 2;

beans 1, 2;

beards 1, 2;

bears 1, 2, 3, 4;

beavers 1;

beds 1, 2, 3;

beefsteaks 1;

beekeeping 1, 2;

beer 1, 2, 3;

bees 1, 2, 3, 4;

Beethoven 1, 2;

beetles 1, 2, 3, 4;

behind 1, 2, 3, 4;

beliefs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

Bens 1, 2;

bends 1;

berets 1;

Bethlehem 1;

Beyoncé 1;

Bible 1, 2, 3 4, 5;

bicycles 1, 2, 3, 4;

billionaires 1;

biofuel 1;

Bills 1, 2, 3, 4;

biologists 1;

birds 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,6, 7, 8, 9;

Birds 1;

birdseed 1;

birthdays 1, 2;

biscuits 1;

bishops 1, 2, 3;

bison 1, 2;

blackberries 1;

blackboard 1;

blackcurrants 1;

bleating 1;

blinking 1;

Blitz 1;

blood 1, 2;

blue 1, 2, 3, 4;

boa 1;

boar 1;

boats 1, 2;

Boatswain 1;

Boeing 1, 2, 3;

Bog 1;

Bolt 1, 2;

bombing 1;

bombs 1, 2;

bonobos 1;

bookseller 1;

Boring 1;

bottoms 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;

botulism 1, 2;

Bovril 1;

boxes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

boxing 1, 2;

Braille 1;

brains 1, 2, 3;

bran 1;

breakfast 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

breast 1;

breath 1, 2, 3;

Bricklehampton 1;

Brimaquonx 1;

Britain 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21;

British 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20;

broadcasting 1;

Broadmoor 1;

broccoli 1;

Broccoli 1;

brushes 1, 2, 3;

bubblewrap 1;

Budding 1;

buds 1, 2;

bugs 1;

Bugs 1;

bulbs 1, 2;

bullets 1, 2, 3, 4;

bulls 1;

Bulls 1, 2;

Burberry 1;

burglars 1;

butter 1, 2, 3, 4;

butterflies 1;

buttocks 1;

buzz 1;

Buzz 1;

buzzing 1

Caesarean 1;

cabbage 1;

caffeine 1, 2, 3;

cake 1;

cages 1;

Cambridge 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

camels 1, 2, 3;

canal 1;

canaries 1;

candles 1, 2, 3;

candyfloss 1;

cannabis 1;

cannibal 1;

canning 1;

carbon 1, 2;

cardboard 1;

cards 1, 2, 3;

Cardiff 1;

carriers 1;

carrots 1, 2;

Carta 1;

Cartland 1;

cartoonists 1;

Casanova 1;

Castro 1, 2, 3;

cats 1, 2, 3, 4 ,5, 6, 7, 8;

caterpillars 1;

catfish 1;

Catholics 1, 2, 3;

cauliflower 1;

caviar 1;

Cézanne 1;

chameleons 1;

chamois 1;

Charleses 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;

Cheddar 1;

cheese 1, 2;

cheeseburgers 1;

cheetah 1;

chefs 1, 2, 3;

Chelmsford 1;

chemists 1, 2;

chemotherapy 1;

chewing 1;

chickenpox 1;

chickens 1, 2;

Chicken 1;

chihuahua 1;

chimney 1;

chimpanzees 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

China 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;

chisel 1;

chlamydia 1;

chocolate 1, 2;

choirboy 1;

Christmas 1;

chromosomes 1;

Churchill 1, 2, 3;

CIA 1;

cigars 1;

classmates 1;

clauses 1;

Cleese 1, 2;

clergy 1;

clicks 1;

cling 1;

clitoris 1;

clouds 1;

cobbler 1, 2;

Coca-Cola 1, 2, 3, 4;

cocaine 1, 2, 3;

cockroach 1;

cocks 1;

coconuts 1, 2;

codes 1, 2, 3, 4;

coffee 1, 2, 3;

Coleridge 1;

colour 1, 2, 3, 4;

colour-blind 1;

computers 1;

condoms 1;

conjuror 1;

constituencies 1;

contraceptives 1;

cooling 1;

cornflakes 1;

Cornish 1, 2;

corporations 1, 2;

coward 1;

cowpox 1;

cows 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

crabs 1;

cranberries 1;

crashes 1, 2, 3;

cricket 1;

crime 1, 2, 3, 4;

crocodiles 1, 2, 3;

crocuses 1;

crossword 1;

crucifixion 1;

Cubism 1;

cuckoos 1;

culture 1, 2, 3;

curry 1;

curse 1;

Curtain 1;

curvature 1;

custard 1

daffodils 1;

Dalí 1, 2;

dandelions 1;

danger 1, 2;

Danger 1;

Darlington 1;

dead 1, 2, 3;

death 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15;

deed poll 1;

Delight 1;

democracy 1;

denominations 1;

depression 1;

Descartes 1;

desertion 1;

desire 1, 2;

detergent 1;

dialling 1;

diamonds 1;

digestives 1;

dinosaurs 1, 2;

Disraeli 1;

divorce 1;

DNA 1, 2;

doctors 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

dogs 1, 2, 3, 4;

dolphins 1, 2, 3;

Dracula 1;

dragonflies 1, 2;

dreaming 1;

drivers 1;

driving 1;

drum 1;

Duck 1;

Dull 1;

Durham 1;

Dutch 1, 2, 3;

dwarfs 1;

dyslexia 1, 2

eagles 1, 2;

ear 1; ears 2;

earthquakes 1;

Easter 1;

eavesdropping 1;

echidnas 1, 2;

Edinburgh 1;

eels 1;

eggs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

Eiffel 1;

Einstein 1, 2, 3;

electricity 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

electrons 1, 2, 3;

elephants 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

embryos 1;

encyclopaedias 1, 2;

energy 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9;

enquiries 1;

escalators 1;

Escoffier 1, 2;

Eskimos 1;

Eton 1, 2;

Europe 1, 2, 3, 4;

Eurovision 1, 2;

Everest 1, 2;

excrement 1;

executions 1, 2, 3, 4;

executives 1;

exhausts 1;

Exocet 1;

explorers 1;

explosions 1, 2, 3;

espressos 1;

Everest 1, 2;

extinguishers 1;

Exxon 1, 2;

eye 1, 2, 3, 4;

eyelashes 1

Facebook 1, 2;

faeces 1, 2;

Falklands 1;

Faroes 1;

farts 1;

fashion 1;

fathers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

fatties 1;

Fawlty 1;

fax 1;

feathers 1, 2;

ferrets 1, 2;

fez 1;

figs 1;

film 1, 2;

films 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;

Finland 1, 2;

Finnish 1, 2;

fire 1;

fish 1, 2, 3, 4;

flags 1, 2, 3;

flamingos 1;

flats 1;

flies 1;

flocks 1, 2, 3, 4;

flu 1, 2;

follicles 1;

football 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

forests 1, 2, 3;

fossils 1, 2, 3;

fox 1;

Fox 1, 2;

Foxe 1;

France 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;

French 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18;

friends 1;

frogs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

fruit 1, 2, 3;

FTSE 1 2;

Fucking 1;

furniture 1

galaxies 1, 2, 3, 4;

Gandhi 1;

Ganges 1;

gardens 1, 2;

gas 1, 2;

gasoline 1;

Gatwick 1;

geese 1;

Genghis 1;

geography 1;

Geraints 1;

geraniums 1;

gerbils 1;

German 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;

Germans 1;

Germany 1;

Gillette 1;

Glasgow 1, 2;

gloves 1;

glue 1;

gnomes 1;

goalkeepers 1;

goals 1;

goats 1;

God 1, 2, 3;

gold 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;

golf 1, 2;

gonorrhoea 1;

Google 1, 2;

goosebumps 1;

gorillas 1, 2, 3;

grandmothers 1;

graphene 1;

grasshoppers 1;

gravity 1;

gravy-boats 1;

grawlixes 1;

Greece 1, 2;

Greek 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

greyhound 1;

G-spot 1;

guidebooks 1;

guinea 1, 2, 3;

guitar 1;

Gulf 1;

gum 1;

guns 1, 2, 3, 4

Hadrian 1;

hair 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;

hammer 1;

hammerheads 1;

hammering 1;

hamsters 1, 2, 3;

handbag 1;

handcuffs 1;

handwriting 1, 2;

hands 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

hangover 1;

hares 1;

Harrods 1;

Harrow 1;

Harrys 1, 2;

Harvard 1;

Hastings 1;

hats 1, 2, 3;

Havana 1;

hearts 1, 2, 3, 4;

heart-attacks 1, 2;

Heathrow 1;

hedgehogs 1;

height 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

helicopters 1;

heresy 1;

heroin 1, 2, 3;

herons 1;

herring 1, 2;

Hickoks 1;

Higgs 1;

hippopotamuses 1, 2;

Hitler 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;

Ho 1;

homosexuality 1, 2;

Honda 1;

honey 1;

hooves 1;

hormones 1;

horses 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

hospital 1;

Houdini 1;

Hovis 1;

humans 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31;

hummingbirds 1, 2, 3;

hurricanes 1;

hydrogen 1, 2, 3;

hypocrites 1

Iceland 1, 2;

Icelandic 1, 2, 3;

idiot 1;

igloo 1;

IKEA 1, 2, 3;

IMAX 1;

impalers 1;

implant 1;

inability 1;

India 1, 2, 3, 4;

inflation 1, 2;

influenza 1;

injuries 1;

ink 1;

Inquisition 1;

insects 1, 2, 3, 4;

Internet 1, 2, 3;

Inuktitut 1, 2;

inventions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13;

invisibility 1;

iron 1;

Iron 1,2, 3;

islands 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;

Israel 1, 2;

ISS 1, 2;

Italian 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

Italians 1, 2;

Italy 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

Ivanhoe 1

Jack-in-a-Box 1;

jackstraw 1;

Jacobites 1;

jagger 1;

jaguar 1, 2;

James’s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;

jasmine 1;

Jaws 1;

jeans 1;

Jehovah 1;

jelly 1;

jellyfish 1, 2;

Jeremys 1;

Jerome 1;

jive 1;

Joan 1;

Jockey 1;

jogging 1;

Joneses 1, 2

Kali 1;

kangaroos 1;

kebab 1;

Kellogg’s 1;

kestrels 1;

Kindle 1;

kings 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13;

King 1;

kissing 1, 2;

knobs 1;

knots 1;

koalas 1, 2;

Kremen 1;

Kuwait 1

ladders 1;

lamb 1;

languages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;

lapwings 1;

Lassie 1;

laundry 1;

lava 1;

lavatories 1, 2, 3;

lawnmower 1;

lawyers 1;

lead 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

Lego 1;

legs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

lemons 1;

Leonardo 1, 2;

leprosy 1;

librarian 1;

licensing 1;

Liechtenstein 1, 2, 3;

lighthouses 1;

lightning 1, 2;

Lilt 1;

limbs 1;

Linnaeus 1;

lions 1, 2;

lion-tamer 1;

Lisa 1;

litter 1;

lizards 1;

lobsters 1;

Loch 1, 2;

logos 1, 2;

London 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16;

loo 1, 2;

Loony 1;

loops 1;

Louvre 1;

love 1;

lunatic 1

M1 2;

macaw 1;

machines 1, 2, 3;

mackerel 1;

Mafia 1;

Maiden 1;

Magna 1;

malaria 1, 2;

mantis 1;

marking 1;

marshmallow 1;

Marx 1, 2;

match.com 1;

Mayflower 1;

mayors 1;

McDonald’s 1, 2, 3;

meaning 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

measles 1;

meatballs 1;

medals 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

medicine 1, 2;

Mexico 1;

Mexican 1;

mice 1;

Michelin 1;

Microsoft 1;

microwaves 1, 2;

midwife 1;

milk 1, 2, 3, 4;

Minh 1;

mirrors 1;

missiles 1;

missions 1, 2;

mobiles 1, 2;

models 1;

moles 1, 2;

mollynogging 1;

Mona 1;

Monet 1;

monkeys 1, 2;

Monopoly 1;

monsters 1, 2;

Moon 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

moon dust 1;

morning 1, 2;

Morse 1;

mother-in-law 1;

mothers 1;

moths 1;

mountains 1, 2, 3, 4;

mouths 1, 2;

moustache 1, 2;

mummy 1;

mushrooms 1;

Mussolini 1;

mustard 1;

mutants 1

nails 1, 2;

Napoleon 1;

NASA 1;

navies 1, 2, 3, 4;

Nazis 1, 2, 3;

Neasden 1;

nests 1;

neutrinos 1, 2;

newspapers 1, 2;

Niagara 1, 2;

nipples 1;

nitrogen 1;

nitroglycerin 1;

Nobel 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

novels 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9;

nutmeg 1;

nuts 1, 2;

nylon 1

octopuses 1, 2;

oil 1, 2, 3 ;

olives 1;

Olympics 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

operators 1, 2;

orange 1, 2, 3, 4;

organism 1, 2 ;

ospreys 1;

ostriches 1, 2, 3;

ovens 1;

owls 1, 2;

oxygen 1;

oysters 1, 2;

oystercatchers 1;

ozone 1

Paddington 1;

painting 1, 2, 3;

palindromes 1;

pandas 1, 2;

paper 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

paperclip 1;

papers 1;

paradox 1;

parliament 1, 2, 3;

parrots 1, 2;

parties 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

passports 1;

patents 1;

pavements 1;

peanut 1, 2;

pearl 1;

peas 1;

pedant 1;

pelicans 1;

pencils 1, 2, 3;

penises 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9;

personality 1;

Peters 1, 2, 3;

pets 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

pheasant 1;

phobias 1, 2, 3, 4;

photographs 1, 2;

photons 1;

physics 1;

pi 1, 2;

Picasso 1, 2;

pidgin 1, 2;

pigeons 1, 2, 3;

pigs 1, 2, 3, 4;

Pinocchio 1;

pins 1, 2;

pixies 1;

pizza 1;

plankton 1;

planning 1;

Plato 1;

platypus 1;

pleurisy 1;

Pluto 1;

poetry 1, 2, 3;

poets 1, 2;

police 1, 2, 3;

politicians 1, 2;

polling 1;

pools 1;

Poopó 1;

pop 1;

popes 1, 2, 3, 4;

post 1, 2, 3;

Pots 1, 2;

potatoes 1, 2, 3, 4;

poverty 1, 2;

power 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;

prawns 1;

praying 1;

pregnancy 1, 2, 3;

princes 1, 2, 3, 4;

Pringles 1;

prisoners 1, 2;

Prius 1;

PR 1;

psychologists 1;

psychopaths 1;

publishers 1, 2, 3;

puffins 1;

pyramids 1;

Pythagoras 1;

Pythons 1, 2

QE2 1;

queens 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

rabbits 1;

racehorses 1;

radishes 1;

Radcliffe 1;

rage 1;

raspberries 1, 2, 3;

rats 1, 2, 3;

ravens 1, 2;

Raving 1;

razors 1;

readers 1, 2;

Reading 1;

Reagan 1, 2;

record 1;

records 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;

religion 1;

Renaissance 1;

revolutions 1, 2;

rhinos 1;

rhubarb 1;

rhymes 1, 2;

Ribena 1;

rice 1, 2;

Richards 1, 2, 3, 4;

riots 1;

rivers 1;

roller-coaster 1;

Rolls-Royce 1, 2;

Rooney 1;

rope 1, 2;

roses 1;

Roses 1;

Rotherham 1;

rubber 1;

rubbish 1;

rules 1, 2, 3;

rumbles 1;

Russia 1;

Russian 1, 2, 3;

Russians 1

Saddam 1;

saffron 1, 2;

saints 1, 2, 3;

salamander 1;

sales 1, 2, 3, 4;

saliva 1;

salt 1, 2;

Saudi 1, 2, 3;

sausages 1;

saws 1, 2;

scallops 1;

schizophrenia 1;

Schoenberg 1;

school 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

scorpion 1;

Scouts 1;

Scrabble 1, 2;

screwdriver 1;

seafood 1;

seahorses 1;

seal 1;

seashells 1, 2;

Seman 1;

semen 1, 2;

semicolons 1;

sex 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;

Sebastians 1;

Shakespeare 1, 2, 3, 4;

shamans 1;

sharks 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

shaving 1;

sheep 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

ships 1;

shoes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

shotguns 1, 2;

showers 1;

shrew 1;

silicone 1;

silkworms 1, 2;

silver 1, 2;

sins 1;

sisters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

skiing 1, 2;

slate 1;

slavery 1, 2;

slide 1;

sloth 1;

Slough 1;

smartphones 1;

smegma 1;

smells 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9;

Smiths 1;

smoking 1;

snails 1;

snakes 1, 2, 3, 4;

snipe 1;

snooker 1;

snow 1, 2;

snowballs 1;

snowflake 1;

soccer 1;

socks 1, 2;

sofa 1;

soil 1, 2;

Solar 1, 2;

songbird 1;

songs 1, 2, 3, 4;

soup 1, 2;

soy 1;

Spanish 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;

spanners 1, 2;

sparrows 1, 2;

speed 1, 2, 3, 4;

speeding 1;

sperm 1, 2;

spiders 1, 2;

spies 1;

spine 1;

sponge 1;

spoons 1, 2;

sprouts 1;

squid 1;

squirrels 1, 2;

stagecoach 1;

Stalin 1, 2, 3;

Stallone 1;

stamps 1, 2;

Starbucks 1;

stars 1, 2, 3;

statistics 1;

stations 1, 2, 3, 4,5, 6, 7;

steel 1;

stomachs 1, 2, 3, 4;

Stonehenge 1;

storks 1;

strawberries 1, 2;

streets 1, 2;

stuffing 1;

styrofoam 1;

submarines 1, 2;

sugar 1, 2;

suicide 1, 2;

sun 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12;

sunflower 1;

sunlight 1, 2;

Sunny 1;

superbugs 1;

supermarkets 1;

supertankers 1;

swans 1, 2, 3, 4;

swearing 1, 2, 3;

Swedish 1, 2;

sweetcorn 1;

swimming 1, 2, 3;

swine 1;

syphilis 1

tadpoles 1;

tarmac 1;

taste 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

tax 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

taxhavens 1;

taxi 1;

tea 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

tea-cosy 1;

teachers 1, 2, 3;

teeth 1, 2, 3;

telegrams 1;

telephones 1, 2, 3, 4;

tennis 1;

testes 1;

thalidomide 1;

Thatcher 1, 2;

thieves 1;

thigh 1;

thrashing 1;

thrush 1;

thumbscrew 1;

Thunderbirds 1;

Tibet 1;

tiepins 1;

ties 1, 2;

tigers 1, 2, 3;

time 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25;

tins 1;

Tintin 1;

tiramisu 1;

titin 1;

TNT 1;

toast 1;

toasters 1;

tobacco 1, 2;

toenails 1;

toes 1;

toilet 1, 2;

Tonto 1;

toothbrush 1, 2;

torture 1;

Tourette’s 1;

towels 1;

towers 1, 2, 3;

towns 1, 2, 3, 4;

trains 1, 2, 3, 4;

translation 1;

trash 1;

trees 1, 2, 3, 4;

Tree 1;

triangles 1;

trolley 1;

trombone 1;

Trotsky 1;

trousers 1;

Trust 1;

tuberculosis 1;

tunnels 1;

Turkey 1;

Turkish 1, 2, 3;

turnstiles 1;

TV 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9;

tweets 1;

Twinings 1;

twit 1;

Twitter 1, 2;

typewriters 1;

typist 1;

tyres 1

umbrellas 1;

Underground 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

underpants 1, 2, 3;

universe 1, 2, 3, 4;

universities 1, 2, 3, 4;

uranium 1;

Uranus 1;

urine 1, 2, 3, 4

vaginas 1;

Valentine 1;

vampires 1;

Vaseline 1;

Vatican 1, 2, 3, 4;

vegans 1;

vegetables 1, 2;

vegetarians 1, 2, 3;

vending 1;

Venus 1;

Viagra 1, 2;

Victoria 1, 2;

Victorians 1, 2,3, 4;

VIPs 1;

Virgins 1, 2;

viruses 1;

Vlad 1;

voles 1;

voting 1, 2;

vultures 1, 2;

vuvuzela 1

waffles 1;

Wagamama 1;

Wales 1, 2;

walkie-talkie 1;

wallet 1;

wallpaper 1, 2, 3;

Warhol 1;

wars 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16;

wart 1;

washerwoman 1;

wasps 1;

water 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16;

Waterloo 1, 2;

Waynes 1, 2, 3;

weather 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

weddings 1, 2, 3, 4;

weight 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;

Welsh 1, 2, 3;

whales 1, 2, 3;

Wheat 1;

wheelbarrow 1;

Whippy 1;

whistling 1;

Wikipedia 1;

windows 1, 2, 3, 4;

wire 1;

witches 1;

wives 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

wombs 1, 2, 3;

wombats 1;

woodpecker 1;

Warcraft 1;

worms 1, 2, 3, 4;

wrists 1, 2;

WTF 1;

WW1 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

WW1 2, 3, 4

yellow 1;

YouTube 1

Zeus 1;

zinc 1;

zoos 1, 2

About the Authors

John Lloyd CBE is the creator of QI and the man who devised The News Quiz and To the Manor Born for radio and Not the Nine O’Clock News, Spitting Image and Blackadder for television. His favourite page is 2.

John Mitchinson, QI’s Director of Research, has been both bookseller and publisher and looked after authors as diverse as Haruki Murakami, The Beatles and a woman who knitted with dog hair. His favourite page is 306.

James Harkin, QI’s Senior Researcher, has a maths and physics degree, a dark past as an accountant for a chain of pubs and is nicknamed ‘Turbo’ for his phenomenal work rate. His favourite page is 38.

By the Same Authors

THE BOOK OF GENERAL IGNORANCE

THE SECOND BOOK OF GENERAL IGNORANCE

THE BOOK OF ANIMAL IGNORANCE

ADVANCED BANTER: THE QI BOOK OF QUOTATIONS

THE QI BOOK OF THE DEAD

THE QI ‘E’ ANNUAL

THE QI ‘F’ ANNUAL

THE QI ‘G’ ANNUAL

THE QI ‘H’ ANNUAL

also by John Lloyd (with Douglas Adams)

THE MEANING OF LIFF

THE DEEPER MEANING OF LIFF

Copyright

First published in 2012
by Faber and Faber Ltd
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This ebook edition first published in 2012

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ISBN 978–0–571–29795–5