50 Fun Facts About Famous Sevens

Which of the Seven Dwarfs never speaks in Disney's 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?

Dopey was first written as a talkative character, but no suitable voice could be found, so he was made mute. He gets by on sounds and pantomime.

Which of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World is the only one still standing today?

The Great Pyramid of Giza is by far the oldest of the seven, yet it is the only one that survives. The other six were destroyed over the centuries.

Which colour did Isaac Newton place between blue and violet when he divided the rainbow into seven?

Indigo and orange were late additions that brought the count to seven, which Newton wanted so the colours would match the notes of a musical scale.

Which Japanese car maker is named after the Pleiades, the star cluster known as the Seven Sisters?

Subaru is the Japanese name for the cluster. The badge shows only six stars because, by tradition, one of the seven sisters is invisible.

Which long-necked animal has only seven neck vertebrae, the same number as a human being?

A giraffe has the same seven neck bones as nearly every mammal, each one more than 28 cm long. Long-necked birds went the other way: some swans have as many as 25.

Which of the seven days of the week is named in English after the Germanic god of thunder?

Thursday comes from the Old English for Thunor's day, Thunor being the English form of Thor. In most Romance languages the same day is named after Jupiter, Rome's thunder god.

Which monument wears a crown of seven rays, popularly said to evoke the seven seas and the seven continents?

The Statue of Liberty's seven rays form a halo around the head. The link to the seas and continents is a popular belief that research has never confirmed.

Which of the seven deadly sins is considered the original and worst on almost every list?

Pride is also thought to be the source of the other six. The list took its familiar form under Pope Gregory I in AD 590.

Which puzzle game by Soviet engineer Alexey Pajitnov uses seven falling shapes of four squares each?

Tetris has seven shapes because Pajitnov scaled the idea down from pentominoes, whose twelve five-square pieces he felt would make the game needlessly complicated.

Which week-long holiday created by Maulana Karenga has seven principles and a seven-branched candleholder?

Kwanzaa takes its name from a Swahili phrase meaning first fruits, and was first celebrated in 1966. Each of its seven days is given to one of the principles.

Which of the seven traditional continents is the smallest by land area and also the flattest?

Australia is the smallest, lowest and flattest of the seven, and the second-driest after Antarctica. Some lists call the same continent Oceania or Australasia.

In Harry Potter's sport of Quidditch, which of a team's seven players must catch the Golden Snitch?

The Seeker ends the match by making the catch, which is worth 150 points. The other six players are three Chasers, two Beaters and a Keeper.

Which Japanese director made the 1954 film Seven Samurai, later remade as the Western The Magnificent Seven?

Akira Kurosawa's film first opened in New York under the title The Magnificent Seven. It took back its original name once the 1960 remake arrived.

Which member of NASA's Mercury Seven became the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962?

John Glenn went back to space in 1998 aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. At 77, he became the oldest person to have flown in space at that time.

Which country was suspended from the G8 in 2014, turning the group back into the G7?

Russia had been brought into the club in 1997 and was suspended after its annexation of Crimea. The summit it was due to host in Sochi was cancelled.

Which of the seven emirates of the United Arab Emirates is the largest, covering 87% of the land?

Abu Dhabi also gives its name to the federal capital, a city chosen as only a temporary seat of government when the union formed in 1971.

Which rock-cut city in Jordan, nicknamed the Rose City, was voted one of the New Seven Wonders of the World?

Petra was the capital of the Nabataeans, a nomadic Arab people who grew rich on the incense trade. The nickname comes from the colour of the sandstone it is carved from.

Which English author created the Secret Seven, a society of child detectives, as well as the Famous Five?

Enid Blyton based the Secret Seven on her publisher's own children. The first story appeared in 1948, after she had written to the real-life Peter.

Which Olympic athletics contest for women is made up of seven events held over two days?

Heptathlon joins the Greek words for seven and competition. The women's contest first appeared at the Olympics in 1984, while a separate men's version is held indoors.

Which hero from Baghdad recounts seven fantastic voyages in the One Thousand and One Nights?

Sinbad was a late arrival in the collection. His tales are missing from the early Arabic manuscripts and seem to have begun as a separate cycle of stories.

Which of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World is the only one whose location has never been firmly established?

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon have left no archaeological trace at the site. One Oxford scholar argues they were really the gardens of an Assyrian ruler's palace at Nineveh.

Which Greek sun god was portrayed by the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World?

Helios was the patron god of the Rhodians, who paid for the giant figure by selling siege equipment a defeated enemy left behind. An earthquake brought it down after 54 years.

On which of the seven hills of Rome did Romulus found the city, according to Roman legend?

The Palatine later became the site of the emperors' residences, beginning with Augustus. Its name is the origin of the word palace.

Which Argentine mountain, one of the Seven Summits, is the highest peak anywhere outside Asia?

Aconcagua can be climbed by its normal route without ropes or specialised equipment. That makes it, by many accounts, the highest non-technical mountain in the world.

In Game of Thrones, which continent is home to the Seven Kingdoms and the Iron Throne that rules them?

Westeros holds the Seven Kingdoms south of a vast wall of ice. Despite the name, those kingdoms are spread across nine regions, from the North to Dorne.

Which seven-member South Korean group was the first all-Korean act to top the US Billboard Hot 100?

BTS got there in 2020 with the single Dynamite, which also earned a Grammy nomination. The seven members co-write or co-produce much of their own material.

Which court sport, born from a misreading of basketball's early rules, is played by teams of seven?

Netball began when New Orleans sports teacher Clara Baer misinterpreted the rules James Naismith had sent her. Each player's bib carries letters that show their position.

The seven bright stars of the Big Dipper, known in Britain as the Plough, belong to which constellation?

Ursa Major means the Greater Bear. The Romans knew its seven brightest stars as the Seven Oxen, and other cultures have seen a wagon or a ladle.

Which of the seven SI base units, the unit of temperature, is named after a 19th-century British scientist?

The kelvin honours Lord Kelvin, who proposed a scale starting from absolute zero in 1848. He calculated that point to lie at about −273 °C.

The Group of Seven were landscape painters who launched the first national art movement of which country?

Canada's Group of Seven believed a distinct national art could grow from direct contact with nature. Tom Thomson, a strong influence on them, died before the group formed.

Which of the Seven Sisters colleges began as the Harvard Annex and merged into Harvard in 1999?

Radcliffe and its six partners took the name Seven Sisters from the Pleiades when the group was completed. Vassar, by contrast, went coeducational on its own in 1969.

Which Yippie leader was among the Chicago Seven tried over protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention?

Abbie Hoffman shared a surname with the trial judge, Julius Hoffman, who convicted all the defendants and their lawyers of contempt of court while the jury was still out.

Which subject joined arithmetic, geometry and music in the quadrivium, the upper four of the seven liberal arts?

Astronomy completed the quadrivium, Latin for four ways. Students reached it after the trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric, whose name means a place where three roads meet.

Which of the Seven Sages of Greece, a native of Miletus, is often regarded as the first Greek philosopher?

Thales is said by Herodotus to have predicted the solar eclipse of 585 BC. One ancient biographer names him the first of the seven to be called a sage.

Who was the seventh and last king of Rome, driven out in the uprising that founded the Roman Republic?

Tarquinius Superbus carried a byname meaning proud or arrogant. He was expelled in 509 BC in a revolt led by Lucius Junius Brutus, after the king's son assaulted the noblewoman Lucretia.

Which of the seven Warring States conquered the other six by 221 BC, giving China its First Emperor?

Qin completed its conquests with the fall of Qi, and its ruler Ying Zheng declared himself Shi Huangdi. Centralised government then replaced the feudal system of the Zhou dynasty.

Which of the seven kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy was ruled by Alfred the Great from 871?

Wessex went on to unite England. Alfred's grandson Æthelstan conquered the last Danish kingdom, York, in 927 and took the title King of the English.

Which star of The King and I leads the hired gunfighters as Chris in the Western The Magnificent Seven?

Yul Brynner also set the project in motion, taking the idea of remaking the Japanese samurai classic to producer Walter Mirisch.

The Seven Sisters are a series of chalk sea cliffs on the coast of which historic English county?

Sussex's cliffs sometimes double for the White Cliffs of Dover on screen, because they are free of modern development and have stayed a brighter white.

Which director made the 1995 thriller Se7en, in which a killer bases his murders on the seven deadly sins?

David Fincher's film pairs Morgan Freeman, as a detective close to retirement, with Brad Pitt as his newly transferred partner. Kevin Spacey plays the killer.

Which Shakespeare comedy contains the 'seven ages of man' speech, delivered by the melancholy Jaques?

As You Like It sets most of its action in the Forest of Arden, where Jaques looks on from the sidelines. The idea of seven ages goes back to ancient Greek philosophy.

Which music-teaching system gives the seven notes of the scale the syllables do, re, mi, fa, sol, la and ti?

Solfège takes its own name from two of those syllables, sol and fa. The seven-syllable set used in English-speaking countries was popularised by the tonic sol-fa method.

Which three theological virtues join the four cardinal virtues to make up the seven heavenly virtues?

Faith, hope and charity are the trio named by St Paul. The other four, prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance, were first called cardinal by the 4th-century theologian Ambrose.

In the TV series The Boys, which caped hero leads the Seven, the superhero team owned by Vought?

Homelander is played by Antony Starr as a power-hungry figure, the chief target of Billy Butcher and his team of vigilantes.

The Seven United Provinces, a republic that broke from Spanish rule after 1579, grew into which modern country?

The Netherlands took shape from seven provinces that included Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht. Spain did not recognise their republic until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

Which Swiss mathematician proved in 1736 that the Seven Bridges of Königsberg puzzle has no solution?

Leonhard Euler saw that only the sequence of bridges crossed mattered, not the route taken on land. That step laid the foundations of graph theory.

Which writer, creator of the Daleks for Doctor Who, devised the BBC space drama Blake's 7?

Terry Nation pitched the series to the BBC as The Dirty Dozen in space, after the 1967 film about convicts sent on a suicide mission.

Which of Japan's Seven Lucky Gods, the patron of fishermen, is the only one of purely Japanese origin?

Ebisu is usually shown holding a rod and a large red sea bream. His six companions reached Japan from Buddhist and Taoist tradition.

Which Greek playwright wrote Seven Against Thebes, the last play of a trilogy about the family of Oedipus?

Aeschylus staged it in 467 BC, and the two plays before it are lost. Its ending was rewritten about fifty years after his death, owing to the popularity of Sophocles' Antigone.

Which music manager formed S Club 7 after being fired as manager of the Spice Girls?

Simon Fuller launched the seven through a children's television series, Miami 7, which was first shown on CBBC in 1999.