100 Fun Facts About Hobbies

Which pursuit was dubbed the 'Hobby of Kings' in Renaissance times, when only the very wealthy could afford it?

Coin collecting has since been promoted from the Hobby of Kings to the 'King of Hobbies', as one of the oldest and most popular pastimes in the world.

Deltiology, a 1940s coinage from the Greek for a writing tablet, is the collecting of what?

Postcards got their collectors' name when Rendell Rhoades, an Ohio collector, took up a hobby magazine's challenge to find something more scholarly than 'postcard collecting'.

In British birding slang, what is a birder called who travels long distances to tick off a rare bird?

Twitcher comes from the nervous behaviour of Howard Medhurst, a 1950s British birdwatcher; a twitcher who misses the bird has 'dipped out'.

Which outdoor pastime began on 3 May 2000, the day after the US stopped scrambling civilian satellite signals?

Geocaching's first cache was a black plastic bucket that Dave Ulmer part-buried in Beavercreek, Oregon, holding software, videos, books, money, a can of beans and a slingshot.

Pteridomania, a Victorian craze that put its motif on gravestones and christening gifts, was a fever for which plants?

Ferns were the obsession, and Charles Kingsley coined 'pteridomania' in 1855 while teasing that daughters everywhere had been 'seized' by it.

An arctophile, whose hobby's name shares its Greek root with the word 'Arctic', collects which toys?

Teddy bears are the arctophile's prize, and the toy itself is named after President Theodore Roosevelt, who loathed the nickname 'Teddy'.

What do vexillologists, whose discipline American scholar Whitney Smith named in 1957, study and collect?

Flags are vexillology's subject, and Smith was still a teenager when he coined the word from the Latin 'vexillum', a square banner carried by Roman cavalry.

Oology, which a 1954 British Act of Parliament made impossible to practise legally, was the collecting of what?

Birds' eggs may be owned in the UK today only if taken before 1954 or under a scientific permit, and selling them is illegal whatever their age.

What is London cartographer John Spilsbury credited with first selling, around 1760, as an aid for teaching geography?

Jigsaw puzzles began as 'dissected maps' for teaching geography; royal governess Lady Charlotte Finch used them on the children of George III.

Max Park's 3.13-second solve at Pride in Long Beach in 2023 set a then world record for which puzzle?

Rubik's Cube solving began as therapy for Park, who is autistic and as a preteen could not unscrew a bottle cap; his 3.13 seconds beat a record that had stood for nearly five years.

Which craft kit, devised by artist Dan Robbins for Max Klein's Detroit firm, has its archives at the Smithsonian?

Paint by number boxes promised 'a beautiful oil painting the first time you try', and Robbins said he took the idea from Leonardo da Vinci, who used numbered patterns to teach his apprentices.

Which construction toy did Liverpool clerk Frank Hornby patent in 1901 under the name 'Mechanics Made Easy'?

Meccano parts were at first bought in from outside makers, until demand outran supply and Hornby opened his own factory in Duke Street, Liverpool.

Which hobby led Terry Herbert to the largest Anglo-Saxon gold hoard ever found, on a Staffordshire farm in July 2009?

Metal detecting paid off handsomely: Herbert and farmer Fred Johnson split the £3.285 million that two Midlands museums raised to buy the Staffordshire Hoard.

Which pastime did Sharon Burns and Tom Porter popularise in 1970s Britain, growing from a few dozen teams to 10,000 weekly?

Pub quiz nights were Burns and Porter's pitch to landlords from 1976: a cheap way to bring drinkers in on the quiet nights of the week, and an easy sell.

Which pastime was born in a New York hotel room in 1962, when Oakland businessman Bill Winkenbach drew up its rules?

Fantasy football took shape while Winkenbach, a part-owner of the Raiders, killed time on a team road trip, and the league he founded, the GOPPPL, was still drafting on its original scoring in 2015.

Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov was de facto curator of which collection at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology?

Butterflies were Nabokov's science as well as his hobby: his bold idea that Polyommatus blues reached the Americas from Asia in waves across the Bering Strait was borne out by genetic analysis in 2011.

Which book-sharing movement began in 2009 when Todd Bol built a model one-room schoolhouse in Hudson, Wisconsin?

Little Free Library boxes passed 150,000 worldwide in 2022, and Bol built the first as a tribute to his mother, a teacher who loved to read.

Which British hobby took off from 1942 with the first of Ian Allan's 'ABC' booklets for spotters?

Trainspotting's first ABC began in the Southern Railway's press office, where the young Allan listed its locomotives to save answering enthusiasts' letters; devotees are 'anoraks' in Britain and 'gunzels' in Australia.

Conchologists, whose hobby grew out of the Renaissance cabinets of curiosities, collect what?

Seashells and other mollusc shells are the conchologist's quarry, and the trade in them named an oil giant: Shell traces its name to Marcus Samuel's London shop, which began importing oriental shells in 1833.

Which Japanese word, slang since the Meiji era, describes buying books and letting them pile up unread?

Tsundoku is a pun: it slips doku, 'to read', into tsunde oku, 'to leave piled up', so the unread stack is built into the word itself.

The first public aquarium, a 'Fish House' stocked by naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, opened in 1853 at which zoo?

London Zoo's Fish House came first, in Regent's Park, and a year later Gosse's manual The Aquarium gave the hobby its modern name and set Victorians keeping sea creatures at home.

Gongoozlers, a word possibly from Lincolnshire dialect for staring, are people who enjoy watching what?

Canal boats are the gongoozler's spectacle, and the word is said to have begun as boatmen's slang for idlers staring from the towpath, until L. T. C. Rolt's 1944 book Narrow Boat spread it ashore.

Which term did Robert Stanley of the dealer Stanley Gibbons coin in 1970 to formalise the collecting of paper money?

Notaphily was a public-relations coinage meant to encourage a market the firm could serve, and banknote collecting only became a field of its own in the 1970s.

Which collectibles, slipped into packets as stiffeners, did the American firm Allen & Ginter print with actresses and boxers?

Cigarette cards began as blank stiffeners, and makers soon printed them in collectable sets for a reason: a smoker chasing the full series kept buying the same brand.

Letterboxing, where walkers hunt hidden boxes and stamp a logbook, began in 1854 at Cranmere Pool on which moor?

Dartmoor guide James Perrott left a bottle for visiting cards at Cranmere Pool, and the moor now holds thousands of boxes, many within a short walk of the road.

Which dissection puzzle reached Western audiences around 1815, carried home on trading ships, and set off a craze across Europe?

Tangram sets of seven pieces came west from China, and enjoyed a second craze in Germany from 1891, when industrialist Friedrich Adolf Richter sold stone versions as 'The Anchor Puzzle'.

Which writing challenge, founded by Chris Baty in 1999 with 21 participants, set a 50,000-word target for November?

NaNoWriMo drafts grew into bestsellers, among them Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants and Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, before the nonprofit behind it announced its closure in 2025, citing financial problems.

Fourteen enthusiasts were charged with espionage at a Greek air base open day in 2001 while pursuing which hobby?

Plane spotting at Kalamata looked like spying to Greek police; the twelve Britons and two Dutch faced up to 20 years in prison but were all acquitted on appeal a year later.

Which British firm made a promotional Ferguson tractor in 1949 and chose a Spitfire as its first aircraft kit?

Airfix chose its name so it would come first alphabetically in trade directories; founder Nicholas Kove had started out in 1939 making air-filled rubber toys, then plastic combs.

Which model-railway scale, 1:87, is the world's most popular, though Britain prefers the slightly larger OO?

HO gauge means 'half O', being half the size of the older O scale, and it runs on the same 16.5 mm track that British OO uses.

Which slot-car brand was unveiled to immediate acclaim at the Harrogate Toy Fair in January 1957?

Scalextric was born when Fred Francis added an electric motor to the clockwork 'Scalex' tin cars that Minimodels, the firm he had founded in 1947, had sold since 1952.

Bandai's plastic robot kits from which anime franchise sold 100 million units from 1980 to 1984?

Gundam's first series drew such low ratings that it was cut short at 43 episodes, yet the plastic kits Bandai launched afterwards sold so well that reruns and compilation films followed.

Which coin was struck in zinc-coated steel for one wartime year, 1943, making strays in the old metal prized rarities?

The Lincoln cent went steel for 1943 to free copper for ammunition, but the new pennies stuck to magnets and were mistaken for dimes, so a bronze alloy returned the next year.

Which glass plant enclosure descends from the Wardian case, first tested in 1833 by shipping British plants to Sydney?

Terrarium ancestors moved whole economies: from 1848 Robert Fortune used Wardian cases to carry thousands of tea plants out of China for the East India Company's gardens in India.

Which pointed tool for making seed and bulb holes was first recorded in Roman times and has barely changed since?

Dibber, dibble and dibbler all name the same stick, and Shakespeare knew it: Perdita in The Winter's Tale refuses to 'put the dibble in earth' for flowers she thinks unnatural.

Which cooking apple descends from pips that Mary Ann Brailsford planted in her Southwell garden in 1809?

Bramley's Seedling takes its name not from the girl but from Matthew Bramley, the local butcher who bought the cottage and its tree in 1846.

Hill-walkers who 'bag' every Scottish peak over 3,000 feet are ticking off which summits, first listed in 1891?

Munros are named after Sir Hugh Munro, whose 1891 tables found nearly 300 such peaks where many had guessed about 30, yet he died in 1919 without completing his own list.

In Highland salmon fishing and deer stalking, what is the attendant who helps and guides the sportsman called?

Ghillie comes from the Scottish Gaelic 'gille', a lad or servant, and the Lovat Scouts, raised from Highland stalkers and gamekeepers, were the first soldiers known to wear camouflage 'ghillie suits'.

Which yarn weight is named after a Norfolk village that was a centre of yarn and cloth making in the 12th century?

Worsted yarn is combed so its long fibres lie parallel, which is why it knits up smoother and stronger than fuzzy woollen-spun wool.

Which knotting craft did sailors, who bartered their work in port, nickname 'McNamara's lace'?

Macramé covered knife handles, bottles and parts of ships at sea, and dictionaries trace the name through Turkish to the Arabic miqrama, an embroidered veil or coverlet.

Which needlework piece, taught to girls from a young age as a sign of virtue, often bears its maker's name and date?

Sampler makers signed their work: the earliest dated British survivor, kept at the V&A, was stitched by Jane Bostocke in 1598 to mark the birth of a child in her family, Alice Lee.

Which craft of coiling paper strips was practised by French and Italian nuns using the torn gilt edges of holy books?

Quilling takes its name from the feather quills the strips were wound around, and it spread in England after the first paper mills appeared around 1495.

Pysanky, decorated in wax-resist with a stylus called a kistka, are a traditional Easter craft of which country?

Ukraine's pysanka is honoured in Vegreville, Alberta, where a town of Ukrainian Canadians raised a giant aluminium egg that turns in the wind like a weathervane.

Which hobby of searching the Thames foreshore at low tide needs a licence from the Port of London Authority?

Mudlarking was once a living: in the late 18th and 19th centuries London's mudlarks were mostly street children aged 8 to 15, or the robust elderly.

Which US state's Crater of Diamonds park lets amateur prospectors keep any gemstone they find, regardless of value?

Arkansas's diamond field came to light in August 1906, when John Huddleston picked two odd crystals off his land; its Uncle Sam of 1924, at 40 carats, is the largest diamond ever found in the United States.

Whose 1934 bird guide, its first printing of 2,000 sold out within a week, is called the first modern field guide?

Roger Tory Peterson's guide, with the field-guide series that grew from it, did much to stir public interest in birds across the United States and Europe.

In British angling, what term covers freshwater species that are not salmonids, such as chub, barbel, roach and bream?

Coarse fish were what the gentry left to everyone else; they angled for salmon and trout and called those 'game fish'.

Which disc-and-peg puzzle did Édouard Lucas present in 1883 under the anagram name 'N. Claus de Siam'?

Tower of Hanoi legend has priests shifting 64 golden discs; at one move a second the job takes 585 billion years, about 42 times the age of the universe.

Which lightweight wood, most of it grown in Ecuador, is the classic material for hobby model aircraft?

Balsa is, botanically, a hardwood: the softest timber in commercial use comes from a broad-leaved tree, Ochroma, that can shoot up 30 metres.

Which society, founded in 1905 at London's Pinoli's Restaurant, has the motto 'not apt to disclose secrets'?

The Magic Circle admitted only men until 1991, when more than 75% of members voted to let women join.

In the Japanese tradition of senbazuru, people fold 1,000 paper models of which bird as a prayer for recovery or peace?

Crane folding became famous worldwide through Sadako Sasaki, a child survivor of the Hiroshima bomb who set out to fold a thousand in hospital before she died at 12.

Which US president signed the 1978 bill that lifted the federal ban on brewing beer at home?

Jimmy Carter signed H.R. 1337 into law. Until then, homemade beer stronger than 0.5% alcohol had stayed illegal for decades after Prohibition ended.

Which toy takes its name from a Connecticut pie company that supplied Yale University?

Frisbee comes from the Frisbie Pie Company, whose empty tins students threw for fun. Wham-O sold its plastic disc as the Pluto Platter until 1957, when it learned what students were calling it.

Which toy brand, founded by a Danish carpenter in the 1930s, takes its name from a phrase meaning 'play well'?

Lego shortens the Danish 'leg godt'. Ole Kirk Christiansen's workshop in Billund made wooden toys first and only turned to interlocking plastic bricks in the late 1940s.

Which Japanese export has a name that combines the words for 'empty' and 'orchestra'?

Karaoke joins kara, 'empty', to oke, a clipped form of the Japanese word for orchestra, because the backing track plays without its lead singer.

Which sport was invented in 1965 on Bainbridge Island, Washington, as a backyard game for bored children?

Pickleball was pieced together from leftovers: a badminton court, paddleball paddles and a perforated plastic ball, after nobody could find the shuttlecock.

Which board game descends from The Landlord's Game, which Lizzie Magie patented in 1904 as a lesson in economics?

Monopoly reached shops through Parker Brothers in 1935, after decades of homemade versions. Magie had designed her original to promote Henry George's single-tax ideas.

What do apiarists keep as a hobby, often calming their charges with a puff from a hand-held smoker?

Bees are thought to calm down because smoke masks the alarm scent their guards release. New York beekeeper Moses Quinby invented the bellows smoker in the 1870s.

Which company's Brownie camera of 1900, priced at a single dollar, brought the snapshot to the masses?

Kodak made its money on film, not hardware: the cardboard Brownie was sold cheaply so that families would keep buying and developing rolls.

Which sticky campfire treat appears in records of American Girl Scout outings from the mid-1920s onwards?

S'mores sandwich a toasted marshmallow and chocolate between graham crackers. The scouts called them 'Some Mores', and the contraction caught on by the 1930s.

Which word game grew out of Lexiko, an earlier game by American architect Alfred Butts?

Scrabble owes its tile values to Butts counting by hand how often each letter turned up in newspapers, among them The New York Times.

In ten-pin bowling, which bird's name is the term for rolling three strikes in a row?

Turkey is only the start: a string of six can be called a 'wild turkey', and twelve strikes in a row make a perfect game of 300.

Which bread did Klondike Gold Rush miners bake, guarding pouches of its live 'starter' against the cold?

Sourdough rises on wild yeast and bacteria living in the starter, with no packaged yeast needed. Veteran miners of Alaska and the Yukon were even nicknamed after it.

Which British stamp, showing a young Queen Victoria in profile, was the world's first adhesive postage stamp?

Penny Black printing lasted less than a year: red cancellation ink was hard to see on the dark design and easy to remove, so the Penny Red replaced it in 1841.

Which former Air Force sergeant taught the quick wet-on-wet oil technique on a PBS show that ran from 1983 to 1994?

Bob Ross picked up the method from Bill Alexander's own television lessons, and his income from art eventually outgrew his military salary.

Which hiking route runs almost 2,200 miles from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine?

Appalachian Trail walkers cross 14 states on a footpath that its conservancy calls the longest hiking-only route in the world.

Which Japanese craft repairs broken pottery with lacquer dusted with powdered gold, making a feature of the cracks?

Kintsugi means 'golden joinery'. Admirers grew so fond of the look that some were accused of smashing valuable pieces on purpose to have them mended.

Which block-building video game did Sweden's Markus Persson create before Microsoft bought his studio in 2014?

Minecraft made Persson, known to players as 'Notch', a billionaire: Microsoft paid $2.5 billion for his studio Mojang and the rights that came with it.

Which French naval officer co-invented the Aqua-Lung during World War II, opening the sea to recreational scuba divers?

Jacques Cousteau had the idea of taking a regulator that engineer Émile Gagnan had adapted for gas generators during a wartime fuel shortage and using it for diving.

Which religious community of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, traditionally sews its own quilts only in solid colours?

Amish quilts were once cut from the same bolts of plain wool as the family's clothes, and antique examples are among the most highly prized by enthusiasts.

Which pastime did Liverpool-born journalist Arthur Wynne launch in the New York World on 21 December 1913?

Crossword is a flipped name: Wynne called his grid a 'word-cross' until the two halves were later swapped in print, and the new order stuck.

Which logic puzzle of digits in a 9×9 grid did the Japanese publisher Nikoli popularise and name in the 1980s?

Sudoku was most likely designed by Howard Garns, a retired architect from Indiana, who died in 1989 without seeing his creation become a worldwide craze.

Which role-playing game, derived from miniature wargames, did Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson first publish in 1974?

Dungeons & Dragons broke from wargaming by giving each player a single character instead of an army, with a Dungeon Master acting as referee and storyteller.

Which toy did Filipino immigrant Pedro Flores begin manufacturing in Santa Barbara, California, in 1928?

Yo-yo factories run by Flores employed 600 workers within two years. The craze spread so far that Syria banned the toy in 1933, when locals blamed it for a drought.

Which Japanese hobby, whose name joins words for 'pot' and 'to plant', grew out of the Chinese practice of penjing?

Bonsai began with the container plantings that Japanese envoys and Buddhist students brought home from China from the 6th century onward.

Which yarn craft takes its name from a word meaning 'small hook'?

Crochet is French for 'small hook'. Its lace was taught across Ireland during the Great Famine of the 1840s, giving impoverished families a way to earn money from home.

Which 2020 Netflix miniseries follows orphan prodigy Beth Harmon on her rise to the top of the chess world?

The Queen's Gambit sent the game's popularity soaring: one American maker said sales of its sets rose more than a thousand percent after the series aired.

Which instrument was developed in the 1880s from the small guitar-like instruments of Portuguese immigrants?

Ukulele roughly translates from Hawaiian as 'jumping flea', perhaps for the way a player's fingers dart about. King Kalākaua championed it at royal gatherings.

Which Yosemite monolith did Alex Honnold climb without ropes in 2017, as filmed for the documentary Free Solo?

El Capitan rises about 3,000 feet, and Honnold reached the top in under four hours. His mother, Dierdre Wolownick, climbed it on her 70th birthday in 2021.

Which winter sport grew out of the Snurfer, a toy Sherman Poppen made for his children on Christmas Day 1965?

Snowboarding hails Poppen as its grandfather. His wife Nancy named the toy by blending 'snow' and 'surfer', and he took up the sport himself at 67.

Which Scottish island names a multicoloured knitting style that the future Edward VIII made fashionable in 1921?

Fair Isle jumpers took off when the Prince of Wales wore them in public. Strictly, the name belongs only to the traditional patterns of Shetland, the island group that Fair Isle is part of.

Which pastime uses jesses, thin leather straps that keep the animal under its handler's control?

Falconry gave English some everyday words: 'haggard' once described a hawk caught wild as an adult, and a 'lure' was the feathered device used to call one back.

Which skateboard trick, a no-handed leap, is named after the nickname of its 1970s pioneer Alan Gelfand?

Ollie was what Gelfand's friends called him. Rodney Mullen adapted the move to flat ground in 1982, and most flip tricks now depend on it.

Which exercise method did a German-born trainer begin refining while interned in Britain during World War I?

Pilates is named after Joseph Pilates, who called his system 'Contrology' and said the movements of cats inspired many of its exercises.

In which German board game by Klaus Teuber do players trade wool, grain, lumber, brick and ore to settle an island?

Catan, first published in 1995 as The Settlers of Catan, became one of the first European-style board games to win a big following outside Europe.

Which hobby saw an explosion of interest after Alex Haley's 1976 novel Roots and its television adaptation?

Genealogy boomed even though some historians and genealogists later found serious errors in Haley's own account of his family history.

Which craft, named from a French verb meaning 'to cut out', glues paper cutouts onto objects under coats of varnish?

Decoupage in its traditional form took 30 to 40 layers of varnish, sanded until the cutouts looked like inlay work instead of stuck-on paper.

Which woodworking joint, a favourite for drawers, interlocks wedge-shaped pins that resist being pulled apart?

Dovetail joints are named for their likeness to a dove's tail. Once hidden under veneer, they are now left on show as a signature of craftsmanship.

Which low-cost British computer, launched in 2012 at $35, was created to rekindle children's interest in programming?

Raspberry Pi demand overwhelmed its distributors' websites at launch, and by 2015 it had passed the ZX Spectrum as the best-selling British computer.

Which garden art did Pliny the Younger describe at his Tuscan villa, where clipped greenery formed animals and obelisks?

Topiary takes its name from the Latin topiarius, an ornamental landscape gardener, and the craft is often described as a kind of living sculpture.

In darts, which word, spelled 'hockey' until the late 1970s, names the line a thrower must stand behind?

Oche has no known origin. A popular but unproven tale credits a brewery called S. Hockey and Sons, whose beer crates supposedly measured out the throwing distance.

In which California county did 1970s riders pioneer mountain biking on 'klunker' cruisers down Mount Tamalpais?

Marin riders raced one fire road so hard that their coaster brakes burned out their grease and the hubs had to be repacked, which gave the Repack races their name.

Toxophilite, from a word the scholar Ascham invented for a 1545 book dedicated to Henry VIII, is a devotee of what?

Archery had been called unfit for scholars, so Ascham wrote a dialogue in which Toxophilus, 'a lover of the bow', defends it. The king rewarded him with a pension.

Which pruning technique trains fruit trees to grow flat against a wall?

Espalier trees ripen fruit for longer because the wall reflects sunlight and holds heat overnight. Castle courtyards used the method to grow fruit without losing open space.

Tumbling, cabochon cutting and faceting are the three branches of which hobby, named from the Latin for 'stone'?

Lapidary work is among the oldest crafts: the early Egyptians were already cutting lapis lazuli, turquoise and amethyst for jewellery.

Which Pittsburgh Pirates star had his T206 portrait withdrawn around 1910, creating a legendary baseball rarity?

Honus Wagner pulled out so early that only about 50 to 200 copies reached the public. Why he objected is disputed; one theory is that he disliked promoting tobacco.

Which Hawaiian, Olympic 100-metre freestyle champion in 1912 and 1920, spread surfing to California and Australia?

Duke Kahanamoku also changed lifesaving: in 1925 he used his surfboard to rescue eight men from a capsized vessel off Newport Beach, and lifeguards took note.

Which comet, found in 1995 by two Americans observing separately, stayed visible to the naked eye for 18 months?

Hale–Bopp was found on the same night by Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp, and by April 1997 some 69% of Americans had seen it for themselves.

Which pastime is known as spelunking in the United States and potholing in Britain and Ireland?

Caving took its American name from the Latin spelunca, 'cave'. A bumper sticker popular with serious practitioners jokes that cavers rescue spelunkers.

The Inverted Jenny, a prized 1918 US stamp error with only 100 known copies, shows what printed upside down?

A biplane, the Curtiss JN-4 'Jenny', gave the stamp its name. It was printed in a great rush for the inaugural airmail run, and one faulty sheet slipped through unnoticed.