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The first Polish language dictionary (published 1746) included definitions such as:
"Horse: Everyone knows what a horse is."
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We are deeply saddened to hear of Sean Lock's passing. Sean was a QI regular right from the first series, and helped to shape the show with his fantastically sharp wit and anarchic good humour. Our thoughts are with his friends and family.
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In 2016, archeologists unearthed a mosaic from the 3rd century BC in Southern Turkey. Its slogan, written above a bread-lounging, wine-drinking skeleton, read: ‘be cheerful, live your life.’ (Image: Dosseman CC by SA 4.0)
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✨COMPETITION TIME✨
Win a signed copy of our brand new book ‘Funny You Should Ask Again: More of Your Questions Answered by the QI Elves’ and all the other QI goodies in this photo!
Just RT to enter and we’ll pick a name at noon tomorrow.
Pre-order: amzn.to/3lkSIYu
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Word of the day: MASKENTROTTEL (German) - someone who wears a face mask below their nose, literally ‘mask idiot’.
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This is a map of all reported UFO sightings, 1906-2014.
(Image: ESRI.)
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In 2021, 😭 became the world’s most used emoji. Previously, 😂 had spent years in the top spot.
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✨COMPETITION TIME✨
This is your chance to win a copy of our brand new book '222 QI Answers to Your Quite Ingenious Questions' as well as our bumper '10,000 QI Facts' box set!
Just RT to enter and we’ll pick a name at noon tomorrow. #competition qi.com/222
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Last week, a Danish museum gave 534,000 kroner in cash to artist Jens Haaning who was supposed to display it in two glass frames in another museum. The artist pocketed the cash, sent two empty frames to the museum, and changed the title of the artwork to ‘Take the Money and Run’.
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Many common nicknames beginning with ‘N’ came about from affectionate phrases where ‘mine’ was used before the first name. So, ‘mine Edward’ gave rise to ‘my Nedward’ and, eventually, to ‘Ned’; and ‘mine Eleanor’ became ‘Nell’.
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Word of the day: NOTGEIL (German) - so horny it's an emergency
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Word of the day: ONOMATOMANIA - the frustration of not being able to think of that particular word you're looking for
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At around age 23, the average person falls off what the researcher Jennifer Aaker calls ‘the humour cliff’: we start to laugh and smile less and less. The average 4-year-old laughs and smiles 300 times a day, the average 40-year-old — 300 times every 75 days.
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You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views. DOCTOR WHO, 1977
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"A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man, who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet." TERRY PRATCHETT
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The oldest known D20 is from 300 BCE.
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The word "Arctic" is from the Greek for bear, "Arctos", making it the "bear-place".
The Antarctic is the anti-Arctic, the "no-bears-place".
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"A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose, and a crooked mouth, and a double chin, and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams, and you will always look lovely." ROALD DAHL
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"A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person." DAVE BERRY
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Movies contain a disclaimer that "any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental" because in 1933, Rasputin's murderer sued MGM for libel in inaccurately depicting the events that lead to Rasputin's death.
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Mikhail Gorbachev was a big fan of ‘Twin Peaks’ and asked George H.W. Bush to find out for him who killed Laura Palmer. David Lynch was contacted by the producers on behalf of the president but didn’t tell them the answer.
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"Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes." NEIL GAIMAN
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After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Lithuania could not afford to send its basketball team to the 1992 Olympics.
The Grateful Dead offered to sponsor the team if they played in tie-dyed uniforms. They wore these shirts on the podium when taking home bronze.
🖼️: Greg Speirs.
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At the end of 2020, the Guardian held a poll in which they asked readers to sum up the year in a single word.
The most common answer was "shit", followed by "fucked".
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A word that can be spelled with only musical notes — A, B, C, D, E, F, G — is called a ‘piano word’. The longest one in English is ‘cabbage-faced’.
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A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves