1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

Meat’ and
    ‘I Married a Lion-tamer’.
     
    ‘Broadcasting’ comes from farming –
    it originally meant scattering
    seeds across a field.
     

    Scolding and eavesdropping
    were illegal in England
    until 1967.
     
    Abortion was illegal in the UK
    for only 164 years,
    between 1803 and 1967.
     
    To avoid being caught on film
    by a speed camera,
    you would have
    to be travelling at
    28,000 miles per hour.
     
    In 1999, a gang of thieves
    was forced to do community service
    along a road in Rotherham.
    The next spring the daffodils
    coming into bloom spelt out the words
    ‘shag’ and ‘bollocks’.
     

    A
williwaw
    is a sudden gust of wind
    coming off a high plateau.
     
    Mollynogging
    is an old Lincolnshire word
    for hanging out
    with loose women.
     
    Areodjarekput
    is an Inuit word meaning
    ‘to exchange wives
    for a few days only’.
     
    A
special bastard
    is someone born out of wedlock
    whose parents later married.
     

    Although they didn’t meet
    until they were teenagers,
    Prince Albert and Queen Victoria
    were born in the same year
    and delivered by the same midwife.
     
    The average human being
    gets through 900 skins in a lifetime.
     
    The air in an average-sized room
    weighs about 100 pounds.
     
    The US navy
    has more aircraft carriers
    than all the other navies
    of the world combined.
     

    An animal the size of an elephant
    could evolve to an animal the size of
    a sheep in 100,000 generations,
    but for an animal the size of a sheep
    to evolve to the size of an elephant
    would take 1.6 million generations.
     
    After a meal,
    a Burmese python’s heart
    grows by 40%.
     
    Squid travel faster
    when they jump through the air
    than they do under water.
     
    Lava can flow
    as fast as
    a sprinting greyhound.
     

    If melted down for scrap,
    a bronze medal from London 2012
    would be worth less than
£
3.
     
    In 2008, archaeologists in Cyprus
    found a 7th-century curse
    inscribed on a lead tablet that said,
    ‘May your penis hurt when you make love.’
    Nobody knows who made the curse,
    or why.
     
    The
Malleus Maleficarum
, a 15th-century
    treatise on witchcraft, warned that
    witches stole men’s penises
    and kept them in birds’ nests.
     
    The average person in the UK
    talks about the weather
    44 times a month to
    18 other people.
     

    The average Briton
    suffers from 9,672 minor injuries
    over the course of a 78-year lifespan.
     
    The National Health Service
    is the world’s 4th-largest employer
    after the US Defense Department,
    the Chinese Red Army
    and Walmart.
     
    The NHS has halved superbug deaths
    and saved 10,000 lives
    in the last four years simply
    by getting doctors and nurses
    to wash their hands.
     
    If everyone in the world
    washed their hands properly,
    a million lives
    could be saved a year.
     

    Mundungus
n.
    The stench of tobacco.
     
    Quaquaversal
adj.
    Going off in all directions.
     
    Pixilated
adj.
    Slightly mad or confused,
    having been led astray by pixies.
     
    Rasceta
n.
    The creases
    on the inside of the wrist.
     

    The first commercial chewing gum
    appeared in 1871, after Thomas Adams
    had failed to make car tyres from
    the same ingredients.
     
    The first chewing gum made by
    William Wrigley Jr (in 1892)
    was given away free
    with his baking powder.
     
    Lilt, the soft drink with the
    ‘totally tropical taste’,
    is completely unknown in the Caribbean.
     
    Before the Queen puts her shoes on,
    a member of the royal household
    wears them first
    to make sure they are comfortable.
     

    Spiders are extremely carnivorous.
    10,000 spiders sealed in a room
    will eventually result in
    one enormously fat spider.
     
    Americans eat 500 million pounds
    of peanut butter a year,
    enough to coat the floor
    of the Grand Canyon.
     
    Every month in the Netherlands,
    133 billion insects are killed
    colliding into cars.
     
    Once a year, on 22nd August,
    Prince Hans-Adam II,
    the ruler of Liechtenstein,
    invites the whole country
    to a party at his house.
     

    In online dating