I should warn you, you’re about to waste a lot of time learning useless trivia. Wikipedia contributors have compiled a list of “unusual articles” — really just articles about unusual things — and the list alone is over 27,000 words long. We’ve collected over 80 of our favourites.
- Phobophobia: Fear of having a phobia
- Vasili Arkhipov: One of several people who saved the world from nuclear holocaust
- Calculator spelling: BOOB hELL
- Rai stones: “Coins” that weigh four tonnes each
- United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins: The best-titled court decision in maritime law
- Cadaver Synod: That time the Pope dug up his predecessor’s corpse and put it on trial
- Red rain in Kerala: That time it seemed to rain blood in South India
- Jenny Everywhere: An open-source webcomic character
- The Turk: The original Mechanical Turk, an 18th century chess-playing machine that was secretly run by a man hiding inside it
- Plant arithmetic: Plants that can count
- Oliver Cromwell’s head: The world travels of the head of England’s Republican dictator
- Muggle Quidditch: The decaf espresso of sports
- Gadsby: One of several novels that avoids using the letter e
- Collapse of Smile: The story of how the Beach Boys failed to complete an album
- Le Pétomane: The performer who could fart at will
- Antiqua-Fraktur dispute: An argument over which font was more “German”. People taking sides included Otto von Bismarck, Goethe’s mum and Hitler.
- Koro: The delusion that one’s genitals are shrinking
- List of animals with fraudulent diplomas: Pets used by their owners to catch diploma mills
- List of unusual units of measurement: Units such as the Sagan, the microfortnight, and “the mass of a bag of cement”
- Candy Desk: The US Senate’s desk full of lollies
- Gombe Chimpanzee War: A four-year civil war between 20 chimpanzees
- Baseball metaphors for sex: A collection of familiar metaphors that feel kind of embarrassing once you see them all in one place
- List of people who died on the toilet: Mostly kings
- Nazi UFOs: Supposed Nazi spacecraft, including the original foo fighters
- Dump months: The two worst times of year to see a new movie
- Gate Tower Building: A Japanese skyscraper with a highway running through the middle
- Great Disappointment: The most famous time the Rapture didn’t happen
- Unfulfilled Christian religious predictions: And all the others
- Pizza farm: Educational farms that grow all the ingredients needed for pizza
- Chillwave: A real music genre invented in a sarcastic blog post, which eventually inspired YouTube’s greatest collection of study music
- Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo: A real, if useless, sentence
- Numbers station: Shortwave radio stations where people recite numbers and no one knows exactly why
- Anti-tank dog: Dogs trained to carry bombs to tanks, but not always trained to leave the bombs 🙁
- Khanzir: The only pig in Afghanistan
- Three Wolf Moon: A famous T-shirt
- Leck mich im Arsch: A piece by Mozart best translated as “Kiss My Arse”
- Garden hermit: The 18th century fad of hiring a guy to live in a shack on your land
- Mary Toft: The 18th century English woman who convinced doctors she’d given birth to rabbits
- Kottabos: History’s first drinking game
- Islamic toilet etiquette: A lot of religious rules about going to the bathroom
- Mollie’s Nipple: Seven peaks in Utah, all named the same thing by the same horny explorer
- Phantom Time Hypothesis: Discredited historical theory that the Early Middle Ages were made up
- Pathological science: Discredited scientific theories that won’t die
- Continental drip: A joke about plate tectonics
- Trimethylaminuria: A metabolic disorder that makes people smell like fish
- Pedro Lascuráin: President of Mexico for about an hour in 1913
- Pig-faced women: A much longer article than you’d think
- Hiroo Onoda: The Japanese soldier who didn’t quit World War II until 1974
- If a tree falls in a forest: A question with surprisingly deep philosophical and scientific implications
- Fedspeak: Intentionally cryptic statements about monetary policy
- Great Stink: A summer-long stench emanating from the polluted Thames River in 1858, so bad that it inspired the creation of a new sewage system for London
- Rough music: Punishment by parade
- Great Molasses Flood: A deadly wave of molasses, reaching 8m high and spreading at 56km/h, in 1919 Boston
- K Foundation Burn a Million Quid: The filmed burning of £1 million cash
- Jesus H. Christ: How the Lord got his middle initial
- Safety coffin: The coffin for people worried about being buried alive
- Jamaican bobsled team: Sanka, you dead?
- Festivus: The Seinfeld holiday that kind of became a real holiday
- Baby Jesus theft: A crime of nativity
- Illegal prime: The numbers the US government doesn’t want you to know
- Ghoti: A way to spell “fish”
- Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D: A comedy horror movie also known as NOTDOT
- Guano Islands Act: The US law that lets citizens claim islands that contain bat droppings
- The Game: Something you just lost
- Dazzle camouflage: Wacky striped paint jobs used on ships during World War I
- Bald–hairy: The alternating baldness of Russian leaders since 1825
- Cosmic latte: The average colour of the universe
- Bristol stool scale: What your poop says about your health
- Whizzinator: A sex toy used for cheating on drug tests
- Rockism and poptimism: Competing strains of contemporary music criticism
- Dihydrogen monoxide hoax: The truth about a potentially deadly chemical you ingest every day
- Ithaa: The first underwater restaurant
- Atari video game burial: The disposal of 700,000 game cartridges in a landfill, including famous flop E.T.
- Fictitious entry: A real encyclopedia entry about fake encyclopedia entries
- Utah teapot: The Wilhelm scream of 3D modelling
- Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah: You already know the tune
- If-by-whiskey: The rhetorical technique that keeps everyone happy
- Kosher locust: Bugs that the Chosen can eat
- Ferret-legging: The sport of trapping live ferrets in your pants
- War Plan Red: America’s secret plan for fighting Britain… in the 1930s
- Getting to Philosophy: A game you can play on Wikipedia
For more, read the full list, or try Wikipedia’s Silly Things, notable “Did You Know?” entries, and lists of hoaxes. Or move over to TV Tropes.
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