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
&nb
sp; 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
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’
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 ab
out
20,000 dongs to the dollar.
It costs the US mint