The World's Greatest Book of Useless Information by Noel Botham Read Free Book Online

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    The word karate means “empty hand.”
    The word byte is a contraction of “by eight.”
    Trabant is the German word for “satellite.”
    Zorro means “fox” in Spanish.
    A coward was originally a boy who took care of cows.
    A group of officers is called a mess.
    The next-?to-?last event is the penultimate, and the second-?to-?last is the antepenultimate.
    The symbol on the pound key is called an anoctothorpe.

SEMANTICS
    Naked means “to be unprotected”; nude means “unclothed.”
    A hamlet is a village without a church, and a town is not a city until it has a cathedral.

FUN WITH LETTERS
    Certain sounds in the English language are real germ spreaders, particularly the sounds F, P, T, D, and S.
    Of all the words in the English language, the word set has the most definitions.
    Rhythm and syzygy are the longest English words without vowels.
    Skepticisms is the longest typed word that alternates hands.
    The letter J does not appear anywhere on the periodic table of elements.
    The letter W is the only letter in the alphabet that doesn’t have one syllable; it has three.
    The longest one-?syllable word in the English language is screeched.
    The longest word in the English language is 1,909 letters long, and it refers to a distinct part of DNA.
    The most used letter in the English alphabet is E; Q is the least used.
    The oldest word in the English language is town.
    The only fifteen-?letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.
    The only contemporary words that end with -gry are angry and hungry.
    The words racecar and kayak are palindromes; they’re the same whether they are read left to right or right to left.
    Only four words in the English language end in -dous: tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.
    Only three world capitals begin with the letter O in English: Ottawa, Canada; Oslo, Norway; and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.
    Six words in the English language have the letter combination uu: muumuu, vacuum, continuum, duumvirate, duumvir, and residuum.
    Ten body parts are only three letters long: eye, ear, leg, arm, jaw, gum, toe, lip, hip, and rib.
    There was no punctuation until the fifteenth century.
    When two words are combined to form a single word (e.g., motor + hotel = motel; breakfast + lunch = brunch), the new word is called a portmanteau.
    You would have to count to one thousand to use the letter A in the English language to spell a whole number.
    Bookkeeper is the only word in the English language with three consecutive double letters.
    Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order, as does arsenious, meaning “containing arsenic.”
    Cleveland spelled backward is DNA level C.
    There are only twelve letters in the Hawaiian alphabet. Hawaiian words do not contain consonant clusters. For example, Kahlúa is not a Hawaiian word.
    “I am” is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
    In England in the 1880s, pants was considered a dirty word.
    In English, four is the only number that has the same number of letters as its value.
    Stewardesses is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.
    No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.
    Quisling is the only word in the English language to start with “quis.”
    Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.
    The most recent year that could be written upside down and right side up and appear the same was 1961. The next year this will be possible will be 6009.

LANGUAGE BARRIER
    There are about five thousand different languages spoken on Earth.
    Chevrolet tried marketing a Chevrolet Nova in Spanish-?speaking countries—it didn’t sell well because “no va” means “doesn’t go” in Spanish.
    In Italy, a campaign for Schweppes Tonic Water translated the name into Schweppes Toilet Water.
    In Papua New Guinea, there are villages within five miles of each other that