Funny Trivia: 150 Weird but True Questions and Answers (Every Answer Checked)

Funny trivia works because of one moment: somebody reads the answer, and the whole table says "no way". Wombats really do make cube-shaped poop. Oxford really is older than the Aztec Empire. Nobody expects it, everybody wants to check it on their phone, and suddenly the quiz night has energy that a question about capital cities never gets.

The trouble is that most lists of fun trivia questions are copied from each other, and a lot of the most famous "facts" on them are wrong. Goldfish do not have a three-second memory. You cannot see the Great Wall of China from space with the naked eye. So this list does it the slow way: 150 weird but true questions and answers in six rounds, every answer checked, a printable history round, a random trivia question picker and a simple way to host it all in one evening.

How we checked every answer

Each question was checked against at least one reliable source before it made the list: encyclopedia entries with citations, science agencies such as NASA, dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary for word trivia, and the organizations behind the thing itself (the Wi-Fi Alliance on what Wi-Fi means, for example). When sources disagreed, we either wrote the answer as a range or dropped the question.

How to host a funny trivia night

Funny trivia is a different animal from a pub quiz. Nobody is supposed to know the answers, so the fun is in the guessing and in the reveal. That changes how you run it. If your crowd prefers questions they can actually know, use our general knowledge questions or geography trivia.

1. 1Split into teams of three or four. Weird questions are more fun to argue about than to answer alone.
2. 2Read the question, then give teams 20 seconds to agree on one answer and write it down.
3. 3Before the reveal, ask one team to defend its answer out loud. This is where most of the laughing happens.
4. 4Read the answer with a straight face, plus the one-line explanation. Let people check it on their phones if they want, that is part of the fun.
5. 5One point for a correct answer, one bonus point for the most creative wrong answer, voted by the room.
6. 6Play five rounds of 5 to 10 questions with a short break in the middle. That is about an hour.

Funny animal trivia questions

Animal trivia is the easiest way to start: everybody has an opinion, nobody has a clue, and the answers are genuinely strange. These 25 work for kids and adults alike.

• Which animal has fingerprints so similar to human ones that they are hard to tell apart under a microscope? Answer: The koala.
• How many hearts does an octopus have? Answer: Three.
• What color is a polar bear's skin under its fur? Answer: Black.
• What is a group of flamingos called? Answer: A flamboyance.
• What is a group of crows called? Answer: A murder.
• What is a group of owls called? Answer: A parliament.
• What is a group of zebras called? Answer: A dazzle.
• Which bird can hover and even fly backwards? Answer: The hummingbird.
• What do you call a baby kangaroo? Answer: A joey.
• What is the only mammal capable of true flight? Answer: The bat.
• What shape is wombat poop? Answer: Cubes. Scientists published a whole study on how their intestines do it.
• What color are flamingo chicks when they hatch? Answer: Grey or white. The pink comes later from the pigments in their food.
• What do sea otters sometimes do while they sleep so they do not drift apart? Answer: Hold paws.
• Which land animal has the longest pregnancy? Answer: The African elephant, about 22 months.
• What part of their body do butterflies taste with? Answer: Their feet.
• How many legs does a lobster have? Answer: Ten.
• Which Mexican salamander can regrow whole legs and even parts of its heart and brain? Answer: The axolotl.
• How do dolphins sleep without drowning? Answer: One half of the brain sleeps while the other stays alert.
• In seahorses, which parent gives birth? Answer: The father.
• Roughly how many teeth can a garden snail have? Answer: Thousands, arranged in rows on a tongue-like ribbon called a radula.
• What color is a giraffe's tongue? Answer: Dark blue to purple-black.
• Which is bigger, an ostrich's eye or its brain? Answer: The eye.
• Owls cannot move their eyes, so what do they do instead? Answer: Turn their heads, up to about 270 degrees.
• Which common farm animal cannot vomit? Answer: The horse.
• How many brains does a starfish have? Answer: None. It has a nerve net instead.

Funny food trivia

Food trivia is perfect for the middle of a dinner party, when people are already holding the thing you are asking about. Expect at least one argument about bananas.

• Which fruit floats in water because about a quarter of it is air? Answer: The apple.
• What colors were cultivated carrots before orange ones took over? Answer: Mostly purple and yellow.
• Botanically speaking, which is a berry: a banana or a strawberry? Answer: The banana. The strawberry is not a true berry.
• Peanuts are not nuts. What are they? Answer: Legumes, like peas and beans.
• Which nut is marzipan made from? Answer: Almonds.
• In the 1830s, ketchup was sold in the United States as what? Answer: A medicine, in pill form.
• Archaeologists have found pots of which food, still edible, in ancient Egyptian tombs? Answer: Honey.
• About how long does it take to grow one pineapple? Answer: Around 18 months to two years.
• Which spice is the most expensive by weight? Answer: Saffron.
• Who invented the ice pop in 1905? Answer: Frank Epperson, an 11-year-old boy who left a drink with a stirring stick outside overnight.
• Which color of M&M's disappeared from 1976 to 1987? Answer: Red.
• In which country are fortune cookies almost unknown, even though many people link them to it? Answer: China. They were popularized in the United States.
• The Caesar salad is named after a restaurateur, not the Roman emperor. In which country was it created? Answer: Mexico, in Tijuana.
• German chocolate cake is named after what? Answer: A man, Samuel German, who developed a type of baking chocolate. It is not from Germany.
• Which part of the rhubarb plant should you never eat? Answer: The leaves. They are toxic.
• In which country was Hawaiian pizza invented? Answer: Canada.
• Botanically, are cucumbers and tomatoes fruits or vegetables? Answer: Fruits, because they develop from the flower and carry seeds.
• Nachos are named after a real person. Who? Answer: Ignacio "Nacho" Anaya, a restaurant host in Piedras Negras, Mexico.
• What are the holes in Swiss cheese called? Answer: Eyes.
• Which fruit used to be sold as the "Chinese gooseberry"? Answer: The kiwifruit.
• Where does a cashew nut grow? Answer: Hanging from the bottom of a fruit called the cashew apple.
• Which fruit wears its seeds on the outside? Answer: The strawberry, with around 200 seeds on each berry.
• What are the stringy bits on a peeled banana called? Answer: Phloem bundles. They carry nutrients through the fruit.
• During World War II, the British spread a story that pilots saw well at night because they ate what? Answer: Carrots. It helped hide the use of radar.
• What is a green bell pepper, usually? Answer: An unripe one. Left on the plant, most turn red, yellow or orange.

Weird history trivia (printable round)

History is where funny trivia gets the loudest reactions, because the timelines feel wrong. Print this round for the teams: the answers go on a separate page for the host.

Print this sheetShow answersFree to print at home. Answers print on a separate page.

Weird but true: history round

20 questions, 1 point each. Bonus point for the funniest wrong answer.

1. 1.Did Cleopatra live closer in time to the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza or to the Moon landing?
2. 2.Which is older: Oxford University or the Aztec Empire?
3. 3.The shortest war on record, between Britain and Zanzibar in 1896, lasted about how long?
4. 4.What did real Viking helmets not have?
5. 5.The Eiffel Tower was meant to stand for how long when it was built?
6. 6.What color was the Statue of Liberty when it was unveiled?
7. 7.Were woolly mammoths still alive somewhere on Earth when the Great Pyramid was built?
8. 8.Nintendo was founded in 1889. What did it make?
9. 9.What was the first product ever scanned with a barcode at a checkout, in 1974?
10. 10.What did one of the first webcams, at the University of Cambridge, show?
11. 11.Which game you might play at a picnic was an Olympic sport from 1900 to 1920?
12. 12.Which animal was sometimes put on trial in medieval European courts?
13. 13.Before rubber erasers, what did people use to rub out pencil marks?
14. 14.What job did Queen Elizabeth II train for during World War II?
15. 15.The man who designed the Pringles can asked to be buried in what?
16. 16.Play-Doh was first sold as what?
17. 17.Who invented the Slinky, by accident?
18. 18.Which was invented first: the fax machine or the telephone?
19. 19.What was bubble wrap first designed to be?
20. 20.What was the first toy ever advertised on television?

playbuzzin.com · Start it on the TV, the rest is in your pocket

Answers: Weird but true: history round

1. 1. The Moon landing
2. 2. Oxford University
3. 3. Under an hour, around 40 minutes
4. 4. Horns
5. 5. About 20 years
6. 6. Copper brown
7. 7. Yes, on Wrangel Island
8. 8. Playing cards
9. 9. A pack of chewing gum
10. 10. A coffee pot
11. 11. Tug of war
12. 12. The pig
13. 13. Bread
14. 14. Driver and mechanic
15. 15. A Pringles can
16. 16. Wallpaper cleaner
17. 17. A naval engineer, Richard James
18. 18. The fax machine
19. 19. Textured wallpaper
20. 20. Mr. Potato Head

Science and space trivia that sounds made up

Science questions are where people are most confident and most wrong. Read these slowly and let the table vote before you give the answer.

• On Venus, which is longer: a day or a year? Answer: A day. Venus turns so slowly that one rotation takes longer than one trip around the Sun.
• Which common fruit is very slightly radioactive? Answer: The banana, because of its potassium.
• How many bones does an adult human have? Answer: 206.
• Do babies have more or fewer bones than adults? Answer: More, around 300. Many fuse together as they grow.
• Why is the Eiffel Tower up to about 15 centimeters (6 inches) taller in summer? Answer: The iron expands in the heat.
• Why would nobody hear an explosion in space? Answer: Sound needs air or another material to travel through.
• Roughly how often does your stomach replace the cells of its inner lining? Answer: Every few days.
• Which planet spins on its side? Answer: Uranus.
• How long could the astronauts' footprints on the Moon last? Answer: Millions of years, since there is no wind or rain to erase them.
• About what share of all the mass in the solar system is in the Sun? Answer: Around 99.8 percent.
• Try it: can you hum while pinching your nose shut? Answer: No. Humming needs air to escape through your nose.
• Why can you not tickle yourself? Answer: Your brain predicts your own touch and dials down the reaction.
• Which planet is less dense than water? Answer: Saturn.
• Which planet was found by mathematics before anyone saw it through a telescope? Answer: Neptune.
• Roughly how many Earths could fit inside the Sun? Answer: About 1.3 million.
• Which grow faster, fingernails or toenails? Answer: Fingernails.
• Which of your lungs is smaller? Answer: The left one, to make room for the heart.
• What is the smallest bone in the human body? Answer: The stapes, in the middle ear.
• Are you taller in the morning or in the evening? Answer: In the morning, by roughly a centimeter. The discs in your spine compress during the day.
• Which rock can float on water? Answer: Pumice.
• About how long does sunlight take to reach Earth? Answer: About 8 minutes.
• Which is the hottest planet in the solar system? Answer: Venus, not Mercury, because its thick atmosphere traps heat.
• Which is the only planet in our solar system not named after a Greek or Roman god? Answer: Earth.
• How much would a teaspoon of neutron star weigh on Earth? Answer: Billions of tons.
• What color is octopus blood? Answer: Blue. It carries oxygen with copper instead of iron.

Funny word and language trivia

Word trivia is great for mixed groups because it rewards curiosity, not memory. Half of these answers are words people use every day without knowing their name.

• What is the dot over a lowercase i or j called? Answer: A tittle.
• What is the tongue-twisting name for a fear of long words? Answer: Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.
• What is one official name for the # symbol? Answer: Octothorpe.
• What is the plastic tip on the end of a shoelace called? Answer: An aglet.
• Name a common English word with no a, e, i, o or u. Answer: Rhythms (also myth, gym, crypt and others).
• Which ten-letter word can you type using only the top row of letters on a keyboard? Answer: Typewriter.
• What is the word for the earthy smell after rain falls on dry ground? Answer: Petrichor.
• What is the smooth spot between your eyebrows called? Answer: The glabella.
• What is the word for the rumbling sound your stomach makes? Answer: Borborygmus.
• What does Wi-Fi stand for? Answer: Nothing. It is a brand name, not short for "wireless fidelity".
• Which children's author was one of the first to use the word "nerd" in print? Answer: Dr. Seuss, in 1950.
• What was the tiny extra pocket in the front of jeans made for? Answer: A pocket watch.
• What is the groove between your nose and upper lip called? Answer: The philtrum.
• Which phrase did the word "goodbye" come from? Answer: "God be with ye".
• The word "robot" comes from a 1920 play by which Czech writer? Answer: Karel Čapek.
• What does SCUBA stand for? Answer: Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus.
• What is LASER short for? Answer: Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.
• Which letter is silent in "Wednesday" as most people say it? Answer: The first d.
• What do you call a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet? Answer: A pangram, like "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog".
• What is the opposite of déjà vu, when something familiar suddenly feels strange? Answer: Jamais vu.

Random trivia questions: the picker

For the last round, let chance decide. The picker below holds 35 random trivia questions from geography, pop culture and everyday life, draws them without repeats and shows the answer when you tap. The whole list is under the button if you want to read ahead.

Scoring, teams and a one-hour plan

Funny trivia falls apart when one person knows everything and the rest give up. The fix is in the scoring, not in easier questions.

• Mix the teams: put the person who reads encyclopedias for fun with the kids or the quiet friends.
• Give a bonus point for the most creative wrong answer. Suddenly everybody has a reason to answer.
• Let the losing team pick the category of the next round.
• Keep the score where everyone can see it. A paper sheet on the fridge works fine.
• Plan: 10 minutes of animals, 10 of food, the printable history round, a short break, science, words, and the random picker as the finale. About an hour.

The best question of the night is always the one where the room was sure, all of it, and wrong.

Start it on the TV, the rest is in your pocket

Reading 150 questions from a phone gets tiring for the host, and the host never gets to play. Buzzin moves that job onto the TV. The game starts in the smart TV's browser, on a Chromecast or a laptop over HDMI, or through the BuzzinTV app on LG TVs with webOS 22 or newer, Philips TVs with Titan OS, Android TV, Google TV and Amazon Fire TV. Guests scan a QR code on the screen and their phones become buzzers. Nobody installs anything or makes an account. Which setup works on your TV is covered step by step in smart TV party games with phones.

TV Show is a trivia game with a voiced host: the question and four answers appear on the big screen, the fastest correct tap on a phone scores, and the game keeps the points. It is a good warm-up before a round of the weird questions above, or a finale after them. For a bigger group, our guide to party games for large groups has more ideas, and how to host a game show night at home covers the whole evening. If you want spooky questions instead, try our Halloween trivia questions and answers.

If you play it, we would love to hear on our Discord what you liked and what is worth improving: https://discord.gg/nbVVeWNXFm.

1. 1Open tv.playbuzzin.com or the BuzzinTV app on the TV and pick a game.
2. 2A QR code and a short room code appear on the screen.
3. 3Everyone scans with their phone, types a nickname and plays. The score keeps itself.