According to the International Trade Union Confederation, British workers have fewer rights than Albanians, Russians or Rwandans.

The wingspan of a Boeing 747 is longer than the distance travelled during the Wright brothers' first flight.

The word 'Nile' means 'river', so River Nile means River River.

As a small boy, Roald Dahl made a pilgrimage to see Beatrix Potter. When he got there, all she said was: "Well, you've seen her. Now, buzz off !"

Dinosaurs were living on Earth before Saturn got its rings.

The average person walks the equivalent of three times around the world in a lifetime.

For Harry Potter fans, the name "Dumbledore" started as a Bumblebee, but then became a term for a slow simpleton

During the Second World War, fish-and-chip-shop managers were exempt from military service.

Netflix has created socks that pause the show you're watching if you fall asleep.

Orangutans warn off predators by making kissing noises.

In 2013, nine babies born in the UK were named Cheese.

Smartphone users touch their phone 2,617 times a day.

Woodpeckers have a third eyelid which stops their eyes popping out when drilling into wood.

Chewbacca's voice was created by combining the sounds of a bear, a walrus, a lion and a badger.

In 1996, two neighbours in Devon spent a year hooting at owls, unaware they were actually hooting at each other.

A smartphone contains more computing power than the whole of NASA had in 1969.

A blue whale cannot swallow anything larger than a grapefruit

Retired characters from the Beano include Little Dead-Eye Dick, Cocky Dick, Sticky Willie, Wandering Willie, and Polly Wolly Doodle and her Great Big Poodle.

During the Second World War, Foyle's bookshop bomb-proofed itself by covering the roof with copies of Mein Kampf.

Bees know when it's going to rain, so they put in extra work the day before.

The oldest you can be to go on a Club 18-30 holiday is 35.

A fish discovered in Australia in 2015 is named Blue Bastard.

The niece of Kubla Khan agreed to marry any man who beat her at wrestling, but demanded payment in horses if she won. She died unmarried with 100,000 horses.

In 1811, nearly a quarter of all the women in Britain were named Mary.

There are only 140 cases in medical history of a man having more than two testicles.

The Kansas Barbed Wire Museum has 2,000 varieties of barbed wire.

Terry's used to make a Chocolate Lemon and a Chocolate Apple.

Dolly Parton sings on the Pyramid Stage in Glastonbury, Somerset, England.

Taking a photo of something reduces your ability to remember it.

Saint Philip Neri, "the Humorous Saint", once shaved off half his beard and always wore a cushion on his head.

The first director of Jaws was fired because he kept calling the shark a whale.

To "poon" is to prop up a piece of wobbly furniture with a wedge under the leg.

You Only Live Once is Katie Price's fourth autobiography.

Jimmy Carter once sent a jacket to the cleaner's with the nuclear detonation codes still in the pocket.

1 in 6 mobile phones in Britain are contaminated with faecal matter.

The heat-proof sleeve on the outside of a disposable coffee cup is called a "zarf".

The French have no word for 'shrug'.

The 1960s US TV show Lost in Space was set in 1997.

The seventh time park ranger Roy Sullivan was struck by lightning happened shortly after the 22nd time he'd had to fight off a bear with his stick.

Autotopagnosia is a condition characterised by the inability to locate and orient different body parts. People who suffer from this condition literally can't tell their ass from their elbow.

In the seven years Wordsworth was Poet Laureate, he didn't write a single line of poetry.

There are more libraries in Britain's prisons than there are in its schools.

The first advert on Channel 5 was for Chanel No 5.

4% of the sand on Normandy beaches is made up of tiny metal particles from the D-Day landings.

Slugs have around 27,000 teeth.

Nightmares are more common if you sleep on your left-hand side.

English women didn't wear underpants until the 19th century.

Sand wasps fly backwards out of the nest to make sure they'll remember what the way home looks like.

Hedgehogs hunt and kill adders.

Vranyo is Russian for lying - even when everyone knows that's what you're doing.

When Winston Churchill visited the US during Prohibition, he got a doctor's prescription for an unlimited supply of alcohol.

When Monty Python toured the US and were asked to trash a hotel suite for publicity, Michael Palin obligingly went in the bathroom and broke a toothbrush.

A "philodox" is someone who loves their own opinion.

Charles Dickens' father went into business with Butch Cassidy's great-grandfather

People in Victorian Britain who couldn't afford chimney sweeps dropped live geese down their chimneys instead.

All Jack Russells are descended from a dog called Trump.

Donald Trump's father and grandmother both had the middle name Christ.

The first-ever skywriting message was an advert which said 'DAILY MAIL'.

Neil Armstrong's boots are still floating around in space.

Everyone has a unique tongue print.

Lloyd's of London insured Ken Dodd's teeth for four times more than they did the Titanic.

Peas can be used to treat constipation in fish.

The concept of "the present" has been dated as Jan 1, 1950, in that after that date, the atmosphere has been so polluted by nuclear tests that Carbon dating can no longer be trusted 

The Bank of Scotland was founded by an Englishman in 1695.

No civilization in the history of humanity has imprisoned as many people as the United States of America. The 1% is in jail.

More people in the world recognise the McDonald's symbol than the Christian cross.

The first police car chase in the UK had a top speed of 15mph.

The first real murder on the Orient Express took place the year after Agatha Christie's novel came out.

Sloths can hold their breath for 40 minutes.

In Tanzania a roundabout is a 'kipilefti'.

In 2015, a Singapore Airlines freight plane made an emergency landing after farting sheep triggered the smoke alarm.

The documentary Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? was found on Osama bin Laden's computer.

An Apple iPhone contains more than half the elements in the periodic table.

Of the 400,000 species of plant on Earth, 300,000 are safe to eat but we actually eat fewer than 200.

Dolphins can't smell anything at all.

It costs more to make the cardboard box that Shredded Wheat comes in than it does to make the cereal itself.

The verb "to run" has 645 meanings in English.

Fish-scaled geckos escape predators by literally jumping out of their skins.

The first bendy straws were designed for use in hospitals.

Pope Francis I used to work as a bouncer in a Buenos Aires nightclub.

All strawberries today derive from five plants brought to France from Chile in 1712.

The first passport-holders had to give written descriptions of themselves instead of photos. Almost everyone described their nose as "average".

Over its lifetime an Arctic tern flies the equivalent of three trips to the Moon and back.

Before he became a spy, John le Carre washed elephants for the Swiss National Circus.

If everyone washed their hands properly with soap, it would save 600,000 lives a year.

There are 177,147 ways to tie a tie.

Pirate ships in the 17th and 18th centuries were required to fly pirate flags, or Jolly Rogers

For its size, Britain has more tornadoes than any other country in the world.

"Twitter" was a 19th-century word for an abscess on a horse's foot.

The Great Wall of China was held together with sticky rice.

A petarade is a series of farts.

Einstein's last words were spoken in German to a nurse who didn't speak German and are lost for ever.

Tintin is called Tantan in Japanese because Tintin is pronounced 'Chin chin' and means penis.

The lost property office at Dublin airport has an unclaimed tombstone with the words: "You will always be remembered, never forgotten."

The last English woman tried for witchcraft was convicted in 1944.

The hands of a human foetus touching the walls of the womb causes the fingerprints to form.

Under extreme high pressure, diamonds can be made from peanut butter.

The facial expressions on Lego figures have become increasingly angry over the last 30 years.

Oxford University was over 300 years old when the Aztec Empire was founded.

The most common sentence in the Harry Potter books is 'Nothing happened.'

Yellow tennis balls, which look better on colour TV, were the idea of David Attenborough when he was Controller of BBC2.

One in ten European babies is conceived in an IKEA bed.

In 1958, Chairman Mao invited Khrushchev to a swimming meeting, knowing that he couldn't swim. Khrushchev had to wear armbands.

Sneezes can travel up to 200ft.

The first bulletproof vests (well, protection) were created by the Zulu when they were fighting the British by soaking their leather shields in water before battle

Helicopter is made up of the words:  Helico    Pter

The first time aeroplanes were used by British police was in the search for Agatha Christie when she went missing in 1926.

The Boy Scouts' motto 'Be prepared' was originally followed by 'to die for your country'.

The droplets in a single cough can contain 200 million virus particles.

Beatrix Potter shot a squirrel out of a tree to provide a model for Squirrel Nutkin.

Two teaspoonfuls of Botox are enough to kill everyone in Britain.

1 in 6 Google searches have never been searched for before.

The USS Kidd destroyer is named in honor of Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, who shared a surname with the real-life pirate Captain Kidd, and as a result, when a new battleship was christened in Kidd's 
honor, the Navy gave it special permission to fly a Jolly Roger.

As a teenager, Xi Jinping, president of China, lived in a cave.

In 1087, William the Conqueror got too fat to ride his horse, so he went on an alcohol-only diet and died later that year.

Lenin spoke English with an Irish accent.

Every English elm is descended from a single tree imported by the Romans.

TITSUP is a military acronym for Total Inability To Support Usual Performance.

A person who was invisible wouldn't be able to see anything.

Britain's share of the cost of funding the Large Hadron Collider each year is the same as what Britons spend on peanuts.

Beyonce has released more perfumes than albums.

Three NASA astronauts have appeared in Star Trek.

For Harry Potter fans, the origin of the word "Muggle" comes from American Jazz age meaning Marijuana

Cows produce five times as much saliva as milk.

Blowing out the candles on a cake increases the bacteria on it by up to 1,400%.

In the time it takes The Proclaimers to sing I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles), the International Space Station travels 500 miles, then 500 more.

A glass of calvados (apple brandy) contains seven apples.

China used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the US did in the entire 20th century.

Ice cream is solid, liquid and gas all at the same time.

In 1845, a bridge collapsed in Great Yarmouth, killing 79 people who were watching a clown swim in a tub being pulled by geese.

The video game Fallout 4 is set in a post-apocalyptic world where you get rewarded for returning library books.

The roundest, smoothest thing in the universe is a neutron star

After Barack Obama visited Kenya in 2015, two women named their sons Air Force One.

Oscar Wilde tore off and ate a corner of each page after he'd read it.

In 1928, the US, the UK and Germany signed a treaty to end all war.

Mozart kept a fart diary.

No matter how large a tree is, it will break if the wind speed reaches 94mph.

Thomas Edison's last breath is held in a vial at the Henry Ford museum in Detroit.

Bolivia has had 190 coups or revolutions in its 191-year history.

A kiwi's egg is so large it's equivalent to a human mother giving birth to a six-year-old.

After two weeks of wear, a pair of jeans will have grown a 1,000-strong colony of bacteria on the front, 1,500-2,500 on the back and 10,000 on the crotch.

Trees sleep at night to rest their branches.

Ostriches have four kneecaps.

Bruce Forsyth often pokes fun at his own chin

London has more trees than any capital city in Europe.

After EastEnders, so many kettles are turned on that Britain has to borrow power from France.

Manchester United is the most hated brand in Britain and the seventh most hated in the world.

Only a fifth of the Sahara desert is sand.

Names of Greek ocean gods included Poseidon, Triton, Oceanus and Doris.

Cauliflowers grow so fast you can hear them doing it.

Napoleon was born with a set of teeth 

Elizabeth I owned 3,000 dresses and the world's first wire coat hanger.

Blackbeard was a pirate for two years.

The average plastic bag gets used for 12 minutes but takes up to 1000 years to biodegrade.

More Guinness is drunk in Nigeria than in Ireland.

Ping-pong balls were made larger to make the sport better for TV.

Shuttlecocks used in professional badminton are made of feathers from the left wing of a goose. Feathers from the right wing make them spin the wrong way.

If you earn $20,250 a year, you're one of the world's richest 1%.

A 'quarter pounder' weighs less than a fifth of a pound when cooked.

Shoes with five eyelets on each side can be laced up 51,840 different ways.

In 2017, a Japanese rail company apologised after one of its trains departed 20 seconds early.

The word 'time' is the most commonly used noun in English.

According to her last wishes, Elizabeth Taylor arrived late for her own funeral.

The oldest object in the British crown jewels is a spoon.

On a single day in 2018, volunteers in India planted 66 million trees.

Table Tennis rackets can be any shape, any size, any weight, but they must be black on one side and red on the other

The owners of Leicester City FC also own the world champion elephant polo team.

Concrete is stronger if carrots are added to it.

Each year, Britons use enough wrapping paper to cover the Moon.

The Dalai Lama is frightened of caterpillars.

Elizabeth I invented gingerbread men.

Finland has the highest density of metal bands in the world.

The US uses more electricity for air-conditioning than the whole of Africa uses for everything

In 2017, a court in Indonesia blamed an increase in the divorce rate on the sudden popularity of pigeon racing.

Elephants can hear better with one foot off the ground.

The American secret service tried to spike Hitler's carrots with female hormones to change him into a woman.

One of the pilgrims on the Mayflower sailed with 139 pairs of shoes.

For Harry Potter fans, the name "Haggrid" comes from having bad dreams, you were "Hag ridden", having been bothered by witches

J. R. R. Tolkien was rejected for a Nobel Prize in Literature on the grounds of his 'poor storytelling'.

African wild dogs vote on whether to go hunting or not by sneezing.

Woodpeckers bang their heads into trees at 15mph, 12,000 times a day.

On the set of Jaws, the shark was nicknamed Bruce, after Steven Spielberg's lawyer.

Nachos were invented by a man named Nacho.

The world's heaviest pumpkin weighed the same as a Ford Fiesta.

Guinness isn't black; it's very dark red.

Half of all human beings have mites living in their eyelashes.

Peter Carl Faberge made 50 exquisite Faberge eggs - and one Faberge potato.

The word for the inside of the elbow is "chelidon".

Only two countries have not ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: Somalia and the US.

Speeding offences increase significantly the weekend after the release of a Fast and the Furious film.

In the 10 seasons of TV's Friends, the six main characters drink 1,154 cups of coffee.

In 1567, the man with the world's longest-ever beard broke his neck and died after tripping over it.

Queen Victoria had a novelty bustle with a music box that played 'God Save the Queen' when she sat down.

Dolly Parton once lost a Dolly Parton lookalike competition to a drag artist.

Humans spend 13% of their lives not focusing on anything in particular.

The distance travelled by your blood every day is equivalent to half the earth's circumference.

A newborn blue whale puts on 14 stone (196 lbs) every day.

Donald Trump is the first US president in 168 years not to have a pet in the White House.

When the Pyramids were built woolly mammoths still roamed the Earth.

In the Great Singapore Penis Panic of 1967, the hundreds of people who feared their penises were shrinking away, included a dozen women.

As of 2019, there were more Lego figures on Earth than people.

Sir Bruce Forsyth is four months older than sliced bread.

The Irish get through 50 beer mats per person per year.

The film Frozen took three million hours to complete.

The hottest place on Earth lost the title it had held for 90 years in 2012, when it was found that the man making the original measurements didn't know how to use a thermometer.

Mozart had a lengthy full name. But it did not include Amadeus anywhere.

Polar bears cannot be seen by using night-vision equipment.

The surface area of a cat, including each hair of its fur, is 100 times that of its skin and is enough to cover a ping-pong table.

The first song played on the Moon was Fly Me To The Moon.

Ants can survive in a microwave: they are small enough to dodge the rays.

People with autotopagnosia literally cannot tell their arse from their elbow.

The last note of The Beatles' A Day In The Life is so high only dogs can hear it.

During the Christmas truce of 1914, one English soldier got a haircut from a German who used to be his barber in Holborn.

Jim Henson's mother owned the green coat that the original Kermit the Frog's skin was made from.

Van Gogh's Olive Trees has a dead grasshopper embedded in the paint.

Elizabeth I always slept with another woman in her bed.

The Queen is the legal owner of one-sixth of the Earth's land surface.

On average Britons will eat 1,126 chickens in their lifetime.

Tortoises can feel it if you touch their shells.

A Kiwi fruit uses more than its own weight in aviation fuel to get from New Zealand to Europe

There are more than 4,000 pubs in Britain called the Red Lion.

Queen Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landings than to the building of the Great Pyramid.

The shortest war ever fought was between Britain and Zanzibar on August 27, 189Zanzibar surrendered after 38 minutes.

The French mathematician Descartes had a theory that monkeys and apes were able to talk - but kept quiet in case they were asked to do any work.

A kangaroo's nipple can produce two different types of milk, one thin type for a younger joey and another thicker type for an older joey

In his first year at Harrow, Winston Churchill was bottom of the whole school.

Astronauts wear belts to stop their trousers falling up.

George V had a dragon tattoo on his arm.

All the ants in the world weigh about the same as all the people.

Invented in 1862, the anti-garrotting cravat shot spikes into the hands of any would-be strangler.

A scientific paper published in 2016 had more than 2,000 authors, including 38 Wangs, three Dings, three Dongs, a Botti and a Brest.

Hans Christian Andersen wrecked his friendship with Charles Dickens by staying with him three weeks longer than planned.

The first Kleenex tissues were made from the same material as the gas-mask filters during the First World War.

Two-thirds of the bagged salad sold by Tesco never gets eaten.

Postman Pat's full name is Patrick Clifton. Fireman Sam's is Samuel Peyton Jones.

Horses have three more facial expressions than chimpanzees.

Ladybird orgasms last for 30 minutes.

Nobody knows who named the Earth.

Every movie where desolate deserted islands are accompanied by seagull noises in the distance is wrong. Seagulls are coastal birds, they don't live at sea.

In his lifetime, Edgar Allan Poe's bestselling book was a textbook about seashells.

On Earth, moss grows in an unruly fashion, but in space it forms spirals.

There are more than 100 million pounds worth of 1p coins in circulation in the UK.

Britain exports more than 50,000 boomerangs to Australia every year.

The Ancient Greeks claimed the sky was bronze as they had no word for blue.

A whole orange will float on water, but sinks if you peel it.

It's impossible to get lost in a labyrinth: unlike mazes, labyrinths have only one possible route.

The Ministry of Defence's official Book Of Abbreviations is 373 pages.

The Elizabethans treated warts by cutting a mouse in half and applying it to the affected part.

The Greek god Atlas had an aunt called Doris.

Harvey Weinstein of Miramax has been thanked 12 times at the Oscars - once more than God.

After 11 months on the International Space Station, astronaut Scott Kelly returned to Earth 13 milliseconds younger than his twin brother.

Almost half the people who have ever lived were killed by mosquito borne diseases (around 52 billion of the 108 billion people who have existed)

The average Briton spends a year of their working life off sick.

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, has towns called Intercourse and Paradise. It takes six minutes to get from one to the other.

The human heart pumps enough blood in a lifetime to fill three supertankers.

Human beings had been keeping sheep for 7,000 years before it occurred to anyone to use their wool.

Yoda's first name is Minch.

The mysterious green code that begins all the Matrix movies is in fact recipes for sushi.

A rooster cannot hear how loud its own crowing is.

More wine is drunk per head in Vatican City than any other country on Earth.

In the film Twister, the noise of the tornado was made using the moan of a camel.

The soil in your back garden is two million years old.

When the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, one of the suspects was Picasso.

As much Prosecco is drunk in the UK each year as the annual rainfall on Wembley Stadium.

Breathing the air in New Delhi is equivalent to smoking 45 cigarettes a day.

A fatal dose of caffeine is 113 cups of coffee, but you'd die of water poisoning first.

Until 1899, the list of official diseases at the Royal College of Physicians included nostalgia.

James IV of Scotland paid people to allow him to extract their teeth.

Until 1858, all British passports were written in French.

Over your life, you take 850 million breaths.

Humans are not at the top of the food chain but near the middle, on a level with pigs and anchovies.

Denmark hated the letter Q so much they abolished it in 1872.

The Pieza genus of fly has species called Pieza kake, Pieza pie, Pieza rhea and Pieza deresistans.

Every year, thousands of Norwegian children are sent to fake refugee camps so they can experience what it's like.

London gets less rain than Rome, Venice or Nice.

God and Jesus are the only characters in The Simpsons to have five fingers on each hand.

Emperor Hirohito's final speech to the Japanese nation was the first time his subjects had ever heard his voice.

Mrs Beeton recommended boiling pasta for 1 3/4 hours.

Wonderpedia magazine was pulled from airport shops after it ran an article giving instructions on how to build weapons from things that were available in airports.

In 1787 the top of Mont Blanc was removed and is now in a museum in the Netherlands.

A beauty contest held in Singapore in 1998 awarded 60% of the marks for knowledge of the internet.

Barry Manilow's No. 1 hit 'I Write the Songs' wasn't written by Barry Manilow.

The physical marker at the Antarctic pole of inaccessibility is a bust of Lenin.

Paddington Bear wears a hat when swimming because Michael Bond's father always did, in case he needed to raise it politely.

Man has probed 20bn km outwards from the Earth, but only 12km into it.

Meerkats have competitive eating contests to establish dominance

The smell of Play-Doh is trademarked.

In 1940s Britain, children's television was shown from 5pm to 6pm, then transmission stopped for an hour to encourage them to go to bed.

The German for contraceptive pill is "antibabypille".

Dogs see in blue and yellow.

Monkeys in the wild don't eat bananas. Bananas are a crop cultivated by humans for human consumption. Monkeys get bad stomachs from the sugars.

All the Slinkys ever made would encircle the world 150 times.

Wrens can sing 36 notes a second.

Harry Houdini could pick up pins with his eyelashes and thread a needle with his toes.

The Bank of England was founded by a Scotsman in 1694.

The tagline for the National Poo Museum on the Isle of Wight is "Have You Been?"

In 1964, the US set off nuclear bombs under Mississippi.

Tartle is an old Scottish word for the moment of panic when you're about to introduce someone and realise that you have forgotten their name.

Chickens communicate using more than 200 distinct noises.

After noticing that the Queen washed up bare-handed, Margaret Thatcher sent her rubber gloves for Christmas.

In the French Harry Potter books, Voldemort's middle name is Elvis.

Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, forgot her toothbrush and had to brush her teeth with her finger.

Churchill looks grumpy on the 5 pound note because the photographer who took the picture had just removed his cigar.

44% of women prefer reading Fifty Shades of Grey to actually having sex.

Bananas have more trade regulations than AK-47s.

There are more than 915,000,000 ways to combine six standard Lego bricks.

Every year, around 3,000 people get bubonic plague.

Lenin owned nine Rolls-Royces.

Painting eyes on cows' bottoms stops lions attacking them.

The Russian intelligence service keeps Hitler's teeth in a cigar box.

The jockey Frankie Dettori is four inches shorter than rugby player Tom Youngs, but only half his weight.

20% of the world's CCTV is in Britain.

Dermatolglyphics (the study of fingerprints) and Uncopyrightable share the same trait - the longest words in English that have no repeating letters