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 a
ll 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.
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 a
nnual holiday
in France.
The huge gong
that was struck before Rank films