FACTS TO BLOW YOUR SOCKS OFF
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.
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.
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