1,227 QI Facts To Blow Your Socks Off Read online

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

  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 ab
out

  20,000 dongs to the dollar.

  It costs the US mint