250 Surprising Facts: Animals, Science, Space, History & Everyday Life

A tiny dot over the letters "i" and "j" is called a tittle.

The plastic or metal tip on the end of a shoelace is called an aglet.

The proper name for the # symbol is the octothorpe.

The & symbol, the ampersand, gets its name from the old classroom phrase "and per se and".

"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter of the English alphabet, which is why it has long been used to test typewriters and fonts.

"Dreamt" is the only common English word that ends in the letters "mt".

"Typewriter" is one of the longest English words that can be typed using only the top row of letters on a keyboard.

The fear of long words has one of the longest names of any phobia: hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.

The letter Q does not appear in the name of any US state.

Caesar salad was invented in Mexico

The Caesar salad has nothing to do with Julius Caesar. It is usually credited to Caesar Cardini, an Italian-born restaurant owner in Tijuana, Mexico. In 1924, the story goes, his kitchen was running low on supplies during a busy holiday weekend, so he threw together romaine lettuce, croutons, Parmesan, egg, lemon and Worcestershire sauce, tossing it at the table for guests. The dish soon became famous across North America.

A mile is exactly 5,280 feet, or about 1.6 kilometres.

It takes around 540 peanuts to make a 340-gram jar of peanut butter.

Most golf balls have between 300 and 500 dimples, and 336 is a common number. The dimples help the ball fly farther.

Many early carrots were purple or yellow. Orange carrots became popular in the Netherlands in the 1600s.

Banana plants are not trees. They are giant herbs, and the banana itself is a berry.

India is the world's largest producer of milk, bananas and mangoes.

Cashew nuts grow hanging below a juicy fruit called the cashew apple, one nut per fruit.

Fortune cookies were popularised in the United States and are rarely found in China.

The croissant has Austrian roots, in a crescent-shaped bread called the kipferl.

The world's shortest scheduled flight lasts about 90 seconds

In Scotland's Orkney Islands, a small plane flies between the islands of Westray and Papa Westray, a distance of under 3 kilometres. The trip is scheduled to take about a minute and a half, and with a good tailwind it has been done in just 53 seconds. That is quicker than many people take to fasten their seatbelt. It is the shortest scheduled passenger flight in the world, and it gives islanders a vital link to schools, doctors and other services.

After water, tea is the most popular drink in the world.

The salvador Dalí designed the Chupa Chups lollipop logo in 1969.

Japan has more than 300 flavours of Kit Kat, including green tea, sake and wasabi.

Japan has around 4 million vending machines, roughly one for every 30 people. They sell everything from hot soup to umbrellas.

In 2014, McDonald's tested bubblegum-flavoured broccoli to tempt children to eat greens. Kids found it confusing, and it never went on sale.

Japan's bullet trains are famously punctual, and their average delay is usually under a minute.

In 2017, a Japanese railway company publicly apologised because one of its trains left the station 20 seconds early.

A bowling alley in Japan once set the world record for the most lanes, with 116 of them under one roof.

A 2023 government survey found that Japan has more than 14,000 islands, more than double the old official count.

A penguin in Edinburgh is a Norwegian knight

Sir Nils Olav is a king penguin who lives at Edinburgh Zoo in Scotland. He is the official mascot of the Norwegian King's Guard, which first adopted a penguin from the zoo in 1972. In 2008, he was formally knighted in a ceremony with hundreds of soldiers on parade, and he has since been promoted several times. The current Nils Olav holds the rank of major general.

Central Park in New York is bigger than the whole country of Monaco.

The Burj Khalifa in Dubai is the tallest building in the world, at 828 metres.

Rhode Island is the smallest state in the United States.

Istanbul is split between two continents, with part of the city in Europe and part in Asia.

Venice is built on more than 100 small islands linked by around 400 bridges.

Saudi Arabia has no permanent rivers.

Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan are the only two countries that are "double-landlocked", meaning that every country surrounding them is landlocked too.

Canada has the longest coastline of any country in the world.

Bhutan measures its success using "Gross National Happiness" as well as money, and it absorbs more carbon dioxide than it produces.

Finland is the world's happiest country, and it loves saunas

Finland topped the World Happiness Report every year from 2018 to 2025, helped by strong trust in each other, good public services and a close connection to nature. It is also the home of the sauna. The country of about 5.6 million people has around 3 million saunas, in homes, offices, apartment blocks and even a few Burger King restaurants. In 2020, UNESCO recognised Finnish sauna culture as part of the world's cultural heritage.

New Zealand has a hill with an 85-letter Māori name, one of the longest place names in the world.

The full ceremonial name of Bangkok runs to around 168 letters.

Four countries have national anthems with no official words: Spain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and San Marino.

India's Constitution officially recognises 22 languages.

Indian Railways is one of the largest employers in the world, with more than a million staff.

The Kumbh Mela in India is one of the largest gatherings of people on Earth, so big that it can be seen in satellite images.

If you spell out numbers without using "and", the letter A doesn't appear until you reach "one thousand".

Indonesia is made up of more than 17,000 islands.

A necktie is not just fashion. It began as a scarf worn by Croatian soldiers in the 1600s, which is where the word "cravat" comes from.

The longest English word has 189,819 letters

The longest "word" in English is the full chemical name of titin, a giant protein that helps our muscles stretch and spring back. Because chemical names list every building block in order, this one runs to an amazing 189,819 letters. Reading it aloud would take hours, and it does not appear in any normal dictionary. The longest word you will find in a major dictionary is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, a lung disease caused by breathing in fine volcanic dust.