101 Fun Facts You Never Needed To Know - David Koutsoukis

Acropolis Leadership Academy 

RESOURCE SHEET 

101 Fun Facts You Never Needed To Know 

Compiled by David Koutsoukis 

1. The dot on top of the letter “I” is called a tittle. 

2. You can’t fold a piece of paper in half more than seven times. 

3. “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” was originally designed to test telegraph transmissions, and uses 

all the letters in the English language. 

4. The title of the Don Mclean song “American Pie” comes from the name of the plane that crashed killing a 

number of musicians including Buddy Holly. 

5. Did you know that it’s impossible to lick your elbow. (You tried to lick your elbow didn’t you!) 

6. 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321 

7. The only words in the English language that have three consecutive double letters are "Bookkeeper" and 

"bookkeeping". 

8. You can sing the Australian National Anthem, "Advance Australia Fair" to the tune of "Gilligan's Island". 

9. If you spell "Evian" backwards it says “naïve”. 

10. The Hundred Year War actually only lasted 116 years. 

11. The shortest sentence in the English language is “I am”. 

12. To tell if an egg is fresh or not you put it into a container of water. A stale egg will float to the top and a fresh 

egg will sink to the bottom. 

13. The longest one syllable word in English is ”screeched”. 

14. A “crash” is the name for a group of rhinos. 

15. "Fortnight" comes from the shortening of "fourteen nights." 

16. The word “jiffy” is actually a unit of time. It is the speed at which light travels one centimetre in a vacuum. 

17. A “spat” is the name for a baby oyster. 

18. A bee flaps it’s wings at 250 times per second. This is what causes the buzz. 

19. A cat has 32 muscles in each of it’s ears. 

20. The tongue of a chameleon is twice as long as it’s body. 

21. A cucumber is made up of 96% water. 

22. There are only eleven hours in a day on Jupiter. 

23. Apparently a duck’s quack doesn’t echo.

24. It takes about 6 months for a toenail or a fingernail to grow from the base to the tip. 

25. A full moon always rises at sunset. 

26. A giraffe has a 21 inch tongue which it can use to clean it’s ears. 

27. A grasshopper’s legs can walk on their own even when they are detached from the rest of it’s body. 

28. A group of crows is called a “murder”. 

29. Human beings lose roughly 40 to 100 strands of hair a day. 

30. A moth doesn’t have a stomach. 

31. The longest word without vowels in the English language is “rhythms”. 

32. If you have six fingers or six toes on either your hands or feet you are said to have “hexadectylism.” 

33. A “twit” is the name for a pregnant goldfish. 

34. A rat can last for a longer period of time without water than a camel. 

35. If a Saudi Arabian man does not give his wife coffee, she can get a divorce. 

36. A seagull is able to drink salt water because it has special glands that filter out the salt. 

37. It is possible to write a sentence that makes sense with seven “ands” in a row. A man has just seen a sign which 

had been painted for his company Roland and Anderson. This is what he said: “There is too much space 

between Rol and and, and and and And and erson.” 

38. Here is a sentence that is impossible to write: There are three (two’s, too’s, to’s) in the English language. Which 

one do you use? 

39. A short period of time used to be called a "whipstitch”. 

40. The velocity of a sneeze can exceed 160 kilometres per hour. 

41. Before buttons were used, the original purpose of a tie was to keep a persons collar together. 

42. There are over 6 billion dust mites in a typical bed. 

43. A watermelon is actually a berry. 

44. A “dork” is actually the name of a whale's penis. 

45. “Go hang a salami! I'm a lasagna hog” is a palindrome (i.e. it reads the same backwards as forwards). 

46. A woodpecker is so fast that it can peck piece of wood twenty times per second. 

47. The colour of a zebra is actually white with black stripes. 

48. If you get on a computer, open a Microsoft Word document and type: = rand (200,99) and then hit the “enter” 

button an amazing thing happens. The sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy do” appears over and 

over again. 

49. A Grand Vizier of Persia in the tenth century named Abdul Kassem Ismael, carried his library everywhere. It is 

said that he had 117,000 volumes carried by 400 camels who were trained to walk in alphabetical order. 

50. Left handers make up about 10% of the world's population.

51. The ancient Romans had flushable toilets. 

52. According to German research, you have more chance of having a heart attack on Monday than any other day 

of the week. (Editors note: Is that why the Boomtown Rats wrote the song “I Don’t like Mondays”?) 

53. If you spend hours working at a computer and then look at a blank piece of white paper, it will probably appear 

pink. 

54. When fetuses first develop they start out female. 

55. You can make up ten words from the word “therein” without rearranging any of its letters: the, there, he, in, 

rein, her, here, here, ere, therein, herein. 

56. Polar bears are all left handed. 

57. Believe it or not there are a number of birds that cannot walk. They include the hummingbird, the loon, the 

swift, the kingfisher, and the grebe. 

58. It is said that American Airlines saved $40 000 in1987 by leaving out just one olive from salads served in first 

class. 

59. Americans drink more coffee than tea. This is the result of a tax placed on tea by the British in the 1770’s. In a 

sign of protest known as the “Boston Tea Party”, 342 tea chests were thrown into the sea, and in an act of 

patriotism Americans began drinking coffee instead of tea. 

60. An earthworm has five pairs of hearts. 

61. There is no word in the English language that rhymes with “purple”. 

62. The trunk of some elephants can hold over five litres of water. 

63. The eye of ostrich is bigger than its brain. 

64. Ants don’t sleep. 

65. If the first day of the month is a Sunday it will have a Friday the 13th in it. 

66. Aphids are born pregnant and can give birth 10 days after being born themselves. 

67. In Mediaeval times armored knights would raise their visors to identify themselves as they rode past the king. It 

was this custom that evolved into the salute that we know today. 

68. There is actually a McDonalds store at Hancock Secondary School in Mississippi. 

69. If you sail at latitude 60 degrees south you can get all the way around the world without bumping into land. 

70. A cat can’t move it’s jaw sideways. 

71. The word “intestines” has each of its letters occurring twice. 

72. Australia is the only country in the world that is also a continent. 

73. The famous Aztec emperor Montezuma had a nephew named Cuitlahac. Translated his name meant "plenty of 

excrement." 

74. If you bang your head against a brick wall you will use 150 calories an hour. 

75. The world's top-‐selling author is Barbara Cartland. She has sold over 500 million books.

76. As well as shaving and cutting hair, barbers used to pull teeth and drain blood in a process called blood letting. 

The white stripes on a red barber’s pole represented the bandages used in the blood letting process. 

77. The fastest growing hairs on the human body are on a man’s face. If an average man never shaved or cut his 

facial hair, he would grow a beard nearly 30 feet long by the end of his life 

78. The chief export of a Western Pacific island called Nauru, is bird droppings. 

79. When designing planes, Boeing now allows an extra 6kg of body weight per person. 

80. Butterflies taste with their feet. 

81. CABBAGE, BAGGAGE and FEEDBAG all contain letters which can be played on a musical instrument. 

82. Camels have not one, but three eyelids which protect them from blowing sand. 

83. “Canada” is a Native American word meaning "Big Village". 

84. A cat's urine will actually glow when put under a black light. 

85. There are some frogs than can be frozen solid yet still be alive when they thaw out. 

86. Charles Dickens liked to write and sleep facing North so that he would be lined up with the poles. 

87. At one time the Chicago Police were trying to track down a number of criminals without much luck. Then 

someone came up with the great idea of sending all the criminals free tickets to a baseball game. When the 

criminals turned up, they were all promptly arrested. 

88. More people speak English in China than in the United States. 

89. Chocolate contains phenyl ethylamine. This is the natural substance that apparently has the same reaction in 

the body as falling in love. 

90. Cinderella's slippers were originally made out of fur. The story was changed in translation in the 1600’s. 

91. Clans from days gone by who wanted to get rid of unwanted people would often burn their house down. This is 

where the term “to get fired” comes from. 

92. In it’s first year, Coca-‐Cola only sold 25 bottles. 

93. In the 1880s cocaine was sold to cure sore throats, neuralgia, nervousness, headaches, colds and insomnia. 

94. “Desserts” spelt backwards says “stressed.” 

95. The only animals that can’t jump are elephants. 

96. Everyone has a tongue print that is unique to them. 

97. Apparently when Beethoven sat down to compose his music he liked to pour ice water over his head. 

98. Each time you lick a stamp you consume about 1/10 of a calorie. 

99. Facetious, abstemious and arsenious are words that contain all the vowels in correct order. 

100. The mythical city of “Oz” from the “Wizard of Oz” was named by Frank Baum after a filing cabinet 

in his office. He had one cabinet that was labeled "A to N," and another which was labeled "O to 

Z." 

For more resource sheets visit www.acropolisleadership.com 

Why not have David Koutsoukis present at your next conference?

101 Fun Facts You Never Needed To Know - David Koutsoukis

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