69 Fun, Interesting & Weird Random Facts: Volume 1
1. That famous hashtag symbol you’re so familiar with from the all over the internet? It’s called an octothorpe. Just like the eight legs of an octopus and an octagon’s eight sides, the “octo” part refers to the eight points. It’s also a sharp sign in musical notation, the pound sign on old-fashioned telephones, and a tic-tac-toe grid.
2. When Taylor Swift was younger, she spent a lot of time on a Christmas tree farm that her father owned.
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3. Snails have very unusual sleeping habits. They need moisture to survive and when they can’t find it, they’ll withdraw into their shells and nurture themselves with a layer of mucous. This is known as estivation—which is like hibernation, but takes place in the summer instead of the winter—and snails can sleep for up to three years. That’s probably longer than any nap you’ve had.
4. Cows are very respected in India. How sacred? They have legal protection India, with many anti-cow slaughter laws enacted by many states in India.
5. Four different United States presidential candidates won the popular vote but lost the electoral college — and the election. They are Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Grover Cleveland, and Samuel Tilden.
6. Great Danes are the tallest dogs. Male Great Danes can reach up to 34 inches tall, and females aren’t much shorter at 32 inches tall. The Great Dane is also the national dog of Germany.
7. Isaac Newton is known for a lot of things, including the discovery of gravity and the laws of motion. What you may not know is that the mathematician, astronomer, and physicist also invented the color wheel.
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8. The life expectancy of a tiger is between 20 and 26 years old. They are also born blind and don’t open their eyes until a week or two after they are born.
9. The architect who designed the White House wasn’t an American. James Hoban was born in Kikenny, Ireland in 1758, and came to the United States in 1785.
10. More than two-thirds of households in the United States have pets, according to the American Pet Products Association. That includes 90 million dogs and 90 million cats.
11. The mascot of Monopoly is commonly referred to as Rich Uncle Pennybags but his first name is Milton.
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12. Every continent has a city called Rome — except Antarctica.
13. Superman couldn’t always fly. He was able to leap buildings in a single bound in the original comic books, but it wasn’t until the cartoons and radio shows were created in the 1940s that he gained the ability to actually fly.
14. It is impossible to lick your own elbow. Go ahead and try!
15. The Basenji is the only breed of dog that does not bark at all. It can, however, yodel and scream. It can also whimper, growl, and whine as dogs often do.
16. Believe it or not, Cookie Monster has a first name, and that name is Sidney, according to the official Cookie Monster Twitter.
17. A female dog is called a bitch. It is not a nice name to call anyone else, though.
18. A dog is often referred to as man’s best friend. The first recorded instance of this phrase came from Frederick the Great, who ruled Prussia from 1740 to 1786. The phrase has shown up in literature and poetry since then, but it was probably popularized from Ogden Nash’s “An Introduction to Dogs.”
19. A hippopotamus can run pretty fast — about 19 miles per hour, actually.
20. Vikings probably didn’t really wear horned helmets. German costume designer Carl Emil Doepler created the look for the Richard Wagner opera Der Ring des Nibelungen, and a stereotype was born.
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21. Kangaroos are not able to walk backwards.
22. Tennis player Serena Williams has won the Australian Open an astonishing seven times. More astonishingly, she was about 9 weeks pregnant when she won in 2017.
23. Poodles are the national dog of France, and the breed is a significant part of French culture. However, poodles actually come from Germany.
24. Many people assume that dogs wag their tails when they are expressing happiness. But wags of varying degrees and directions can indicate anxiety, fear, aggression, and insecurity as well.
25. The person who supplied the voice of Tigger in the Winne the Pooh cartoons is Paul Winchell. In addition to being a voice artist, he worked as an actor, comedian, and ventriloquist. He also invented the artificial heart. The heralded performer even earned a Grammy Award for the song “The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers.”
26. Patrick Mahomes II, the MVP of Super Bowl LIV, is the son of Pat Mahomes, who pitched for six different teams in Major League Baseball.
27. How big is the sun relative to Earth? The sun is so astronomically large that 1.3 million Earths can fit inside it.
28. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri is exactly as wide as it is tall: 630 feet.
29. The brightest star in the sky is Sirius, located in the Canis Major constellation. It’s almost twice as bright as Canopus, the second-brightest star.
30. Studies have shown that petting a dog or cat for 10 minutes can reduce stress levels and blood pressure.
31. There are 118 ridges on the American dime, and none on the penny. Dimes and pennies are very similar in size and shape, so this is a very good feature for the visually impaired.
32. Botanically speaking, almonds are considered a fruit, and they belong to the same family as the peach. This also means that almond butter is actually a jam.
33. The “www” that you see in URLs when you’re on the internet stands for “world wide web.”
34. Starbuck is a town in Columbia County, Washington. It does not have a Starbucks. It’s also a town in Minnesota. There is no Starbucks there, either.
35. Are you afraid of birds? Then you have ophidiophobia.
36. Marilyn Monroe, who won a Golden Globe in 1960 for her performance in Some Like It Hot, was born in Los Angeles, California as Norma Jeane Mortenson.
37. The phrase “let the cat out of the bag” does not have anything to do with our feline friends but instead refers to the cat o’ nine tails, which was the whip the British Royal Navy used to punish sailors. The instrument was kept in a sack and once it was out of the bag, it meant that someone was in trouble.
38. Manatees have no natural predators in the wild. Unfortunately, humans and their boats can have a dramatic effect on their natural habitat, and they are considered an endangered species.
39. At maximum speed, horses can run up to 55 miles per hour.
40. We associate the Eiffel Tower as the popular cultural symbol of Paris, France. However, it was originally offered to Barcelona, Spain.
41. Fido is a generic name often given to otherwise nameless dogs, and once we understand the origin of the word, it’s easy to see why. Fido is a Latin word meaning to trust and confide. Incidentally, Fido was also the name of a yellow mongrel dog owned by Abraham Lincoln before he was elected president in 1861.
42. The longest river in the world is the Nile, which is 4,132 miles. It flows from eastern Africa and into the Mediterranean Sea.
43. The largest Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton was discovered in Saskatchewan, Canada. It measured 42.7 feet long. The University of Alberta paleontologists named it Scotty, and it lived about 66 million years ago. It was first found in 1991, but took well over a decade to remove.
44. Newborns have to develop the ability to see color, and they start seeing red when they’re around two weeks old. From there, they see more and more colors until they’re able to see the full spectrum around five months old.
45. In the first year of its life, a blue whale will gain about two hundred pounds — every single day.
46. When Jimmy Carter was elected as the 39th President of the United States, he was forced to give up his peanut farm.
47. The very first computer was built in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering. It took up 1,500 square feet and weighed 60,000 pounds.
48. Tigers are the largest cat species in the entire world. They can weigh up to 670 pounds and grow over 10 feet in length.
49. Japan has more vending machines than any country in the world. There are more than five million of them, and thanks to its pretty lower crime rate, vandalism is relatively rare.
50. Most of us know that an octopus has eight arms. What many people don’t know is that they also have three hearts.
51. Imagine that you could drive your car straight into the sky. You’d reach outer space in about an hour.
52. Butterflies have taste sensors located on their hind feet. A butterfly eats with their proboscis to drink up juices and nectars from flowers, but they can’t taste with it. Instead, they use the back of their legs to taste.
53. The original oranges were grown in Southeast Asia, and they were a tangerine-pomelo hybrid that was actually green.
54. You probably know that a fight between two people is called a duel. You may not know that a fight between three people is called a truel.
55. If pigs ever fly, their fellow pigs probably won’t be able to see them in the air. Pigs cannot bend their necks long enough to look up at the sky.
56. It’s possible that Madagascar was the source of the last vanilla ice cream cone you enjoyed. After all, they’re the largest vanilla-producing country in the world.
57. National Waffle Day is celebrated in America on August 24th. The date commemorates the anniversary of the United States patent issued on the waffle iron in 1869.
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58. The first game the Toronto Raptors played was on November 3, 1995, against the New Jersey Nets. The first points were scored by shooting guard Alvin Robertson, and the Raptors won 94-79.
59. Ribbonwood trees grow naturally in Queensland, in the northeastern part of Australia. These trees are also known as idiot fruit.
60. The famous Toto from The Wizard of Oz was a female Cairn Terrier named Terry. It was owned by famed Hollywood dog trainer Carl Spitz.
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61. Only one professional sports team is named after a literary reference. Can you guess what it is? It’s the Baltimore Ravens of Maryland who were named after Edgar Allan Poe’s seminal classic poem.
62. The only mammal that can actually fly are bats. Of course, this doesn’t include humans who can be trained to fly airplanes.
63. The only number that has the same amount of letters in its name is four.
64. The word “Brobdingnagian” describes something humongous or giant. It comes from the 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, where Brobdingnag is the name of the land occupied by giants.
65. Crocodiles cannot stick their tongues out.
66. Vatican City is the smallest country in the world. Entirely surrounded by Rome, Italy, it is merely 109 acres.
67. February is the only month where it’s entirely possible for you not to see a full moon at all.
68. Your sneeze can travel around 100 miles per hour. Bless you!
69. Antarctica is the least-populated continent on Earth. Australia is the second least.
Read more fun trivia content at Content Bash!
Looking for more fun, weird, interesting, and cool facts about random stuff? Check out Volume 2 and Volume 3 and Volume 4!
Interested in facts and trivia about great movies like The Pope of Greenwich Village or Cool Hand Luke or Michael Mann’s Heat or Pee-wee’s Big Adventure or Searching for Bobby Fischer? We’ve got them!
Do you like to read books? Even if you don’t, please check out our listicles of literary superstars like Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Robert Louis Stevenson and Ernest Hemingway!
Cover Image Credit: Image by Lubos Houska from Pixabay
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