1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off Read Online Free PDF Page A

make
    a kilo of saffron.
     

    Alexander the Great
    washed his hair in saffron
    to keep it shiny and orange.
     
    In 1999, a four-year-old girl
    turned yellow
    after drinking too much
    Sunny Delight.
     
    Russian has no word for ‘blue’,
    only two different words for
    ‘light blue’ and ‘dark blue’.
     
    Andy Warhol always wore
    green underpants.
     

    25 million Bibles were printed in 2011,
    compared to 208 million IKEA catalogues.
     
    The English version of Wikipedia
    has 50 times more words than
    the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
.
     
    Up to 2010, Wikipedia had taken
    100 million person-hours to write:
    about the same amount of time
    that the population of the USA
    spends watching TV ad breaks
    in a single weekend.
     
    There is more information
    in one edition of the
New York Times
than
    the average person
    in 17th-century England
    would have come across in a lifetime.
     

    When Einstein published his
    Theory of General Relativity,
    the
New York Times
sent their
    golfing correspondent
    to interview him.
     
    The historic news of the
    first manned powered flight
    by the Wright Brothers
    first appeared in the magazine
    Gleanings in Bee Culture
.
     
    Dune
, by Frank Herbert, the world’s best-selling
    science fiction novel, was rejected
    over 20 times before being accepted
    by a publisher of car manuals.
     
    Ernest Hemingway bought the
    shotgun that he used to kill himself
    at Abercrombie & Fitch.
     

    Leonardo da Vinci
    was the first person to observe
    the curvature of the human spine.
    Until then everyone had assumed
    that it was straight.
     
    Rosa whitfield
is a rose
    named after actress June Whitfield.
    As she pointed out,
    ‘The catalogue describes it as
    “superb for bedding,
    best up against a wall”.’
     
    Someone who is
cock-throppled
    has an extremely prominent
    Adam’s apple.
     
    The symbols used by !$%@ing cartoonists
    to indicate swearing are called
grawlixes
.
     

    Jeremy Bentham’s body
    has been dressed
    in moth-resistant underwear
    since 1939.
     
    When Jeremy Paxman
    was at Cambridge, he failed
    to get into his college’s
    University Challenge
team.
     
    Before Jeremy Clarkson
    became a journalist,
    he sold Paddington Bears
    for a living.
     
    Jeremy Kyle’s father
    was the Queen Mother’s
    accountant and personal secretary.
     

    A
babalevante
    is someone who makes
    feeble jokes.
     
    Babeship
    is another word for
    infancy.
     
    Borborygmi
    are stomach rumbles.
     
    Buggerare
    is Italian for
    ‘to cheat’ or ‘swindle’.
     

    If you have a pizza
    with radius
z
and thickness
a
,
    its volume is
pi*z*z*a
.
     
    In 1998, 10,113 American women
    insured themselves against
    Virgin Birth
    at the millennium.
     
    The first motorist to be fined
    for speeding in the UK was
    Walter Arnold in 1896.
    He was doing 8 mph in a 2 mph zone.
     
    The first London Underground
    trains were nicknamed
    ‘sewer trams’.
     

    The world’s lightest metal
    is 100 times lighter than styrofoam
    and can rest on a dandelion puff
    without damaging it.
     
    Graphene,
    the world’s strongest material,
    is a million times thinner than paper
    but 200 times stronger than steel.
     
    To break through a sheet
    of graphene as thick as cling film
    would take the force of an elephant
    balanced on the point of a pencil.
     
    The pressure in the deepest ocean,
    at the bottom of the Marianas Trench,
    is equal to the weight of ten brown bears
    balancing on a postage stamp.
     

    All polar bears are Irish:
    they’re descended from brown bears
    that lived in Ireland
    over 10,000 years ago.
     
    More than half the world’s population
    is under 25
    and more than half of it
    is bilingual.
     
    Established writers and artists are
    18 times more likely
    to kill themselves
    than the general population.
     
    People with schizophrenia
    are three times more likely to smoke
    than the average person.
     

    Zischeln
    is a useful German verb meaning
    ‘to whisper angrily’.
     
    The Italian verb
asolare
    means ‘to pass time in a