40 Fun Facts About International Literacy Day

Which author wrote Green Eggs and Ham after his editor bet him $50 he couldn't use just 50 words?

Dr. Seuss won the bet with a book built from exactly 50 different words. The challenge followed his earlier hit The Cat in the Hat, which had needed 236.

Which country star mails free books to children in honor of her father, who could not read?

Dolly Parton launched her Imagination Library in 1995 in Sevier County, Tennessee. Each enrolled child gets a free book every month from birth until age five.

Which girls' schooling campaigner, shot by the Taliban on a bus, won the Nobel Peace Prize at 17?

Malala Yousafzai survived the 2012 attack in Pakistan's Swat Valley, where she was riding home after an exam. She shared the 2014 prize with Kailash Satyarthi of India.

Which Frenchman, blinded by an awl in his father's workshop, devised a raised-dot reading system?

Louis Braille was inspired by a system that Charles Barbier had invented, and made his own more compact. It went unused by most educators until years after his death.

Which slab, found by a French army officer in Egypt in 1799, became the key to reading hieroglyphs?

The Rosetta Stone carries the same decree in three versions, which let Jean-François Champollion announce his breakthrough in 1822. It is the most visited object in the British Museum.

Which abolitionist learned his letters from a Baltimore enslaver's wife until her husband objected?

Frederick Douglass kept going in secret, learning to read from white children in the neighborhood. Hugh Auld had feared that literacy would make enslaved people want freedom.

Which Cherokee silversmith completed a syllabary in 1821 so his people could read their own language?

Sequoyah gave each of his 86 symbols the sound of a syllable, and the Cherokee Nation officially adopted them in 1825. By 1828 the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper was being printed in his script.

UNESCO's King Sejong Literacy Prize honors the ruler who created which alphabet in the 1440s?

Hangul was presented at King Sejong's court around the end of 1443, because the older characters were so hard that commoners stayed largely illiterate. South Korea has funded the prize since 1989.

Which goldsmith from Mainz brought movable-type printing to Europe with a press running by 1450?

Johannes Gutenberg was not the first to use movable type, which East Asia already had, but his press printed far faster. A German poem may have been the first item off it.

Which everyday material is Chinese official Cai Lun traditionally said to have invented in AD 105?

Paper existed in cruder forms before Cai Lun, but his recipe of tree bark, hemp waste, old rags and fishing nets let it be made on a large scale.

International Literacy Day, proclaimed by UNESCO in 1966, is celebrated on which date each year?

September 8 was first celebrated as the day in 1967. Each year's celebration carries a theme, such as Literacy and Health or Literacy and Peace.

Which Caribbean country sent 100,000 young volunteers into the countryside in 1961 to wipe out illiteracy?

Cuba called 1961 its Year of Education, and the volunteers were aged just 10 to 19. They left school to live and work with their students during the eight-month campaign.

Which ancient philosopher gives his name to the UNESCO literacy prize that China has funded since 2005?

Confucius is honored by the prize as a great scholar. Its winners receive a medal, a diploma and a study visit to literacy projects in China.

Which steel tycoon paid for more than 2,500 libraries, starting with one in his Scottish birthplace?

Andrew Carnegie opened his first library in Dunfermline and funded 2,509 between 1883 and 1929. The early ones went almost only to places he had a personal tie to, such as Pittsburgh.

UNESCO set World Book Day on 23 April to honor Miguel de Cervantes and which English playwright?

William Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616 by England's old Julian calendar. Cervantes was buried that day in Spain, which already used the Gregorian calendar, so the two dates fell ten days apart.

Which children's TV show premiered in 1969 to prepare preschoolers from low-income families for school?

Sesame Street grew out of 1966 talks between TV producer Joan Ganz Cooney and foundation executive Lloyd Morrisett. By 1996, 95 percent of American preschoolers had watched it by age three.

Which crime novelist does UNESCO's Index Translationum rank as the world's most translated individual author?

Agatha Christie leads the Index, a database of translated books that began under the League of Nations and passed to UNESCO in 1946.

Which learning disability, once called word blindness, makes reading hard whatever a person's intelligence?

Dyslexia is the most common learning disability of all. A British physician described it in 1896 in a medical journal report titled Congenital Word Blindness.

Which script, pressed into clay with a reed stylus by Sumerian scribes, is the earliest known writing system?

Cuneiform takes its name from cuneus, the Latin for wedge, after the shape its strokes left in the clay. It was first developed to write Sumerian in what is now southern Iraq.

Which book-sharing movement began in 2009 with a model schoolhouse on Todd Bol's lawn in Wisconsin?

Little Free Library started as Bol's tribute to his late mother, a schoolteacher who loved books. He mounted the wooden box on a post and filled it for anyone to borrow from.

Which librarian, a spelling reformer who trimmed his own first name, devised an 1876 decimal system for shelving books?

Melvil Dewey shortened his first name from Melville and for a time even spelled his surname Dui. In the same year as his system he founded The Library Journal.

Which Roots actor hosted Reading Rainbow on PBS from 1983, introducing children to a featured book each episode?

LeVar Burton fronted the series until 2006, and it collected a Peabody Award and 26 Emmys along the way.

Which lexicographer's Blue-Back Speller taught American children to read long before his 1828 dictionary?

Noah Webster saw his speller far outsell his dictionary. The little schoolbook had sold 15 million copies by 1837, while the 1828 dictionary's first edition managed only 2,500.

Which publisher did Allen Lane co-found in 1935 to sell quality paperbacks for sixpence each?

Penguin Books priced its first titles the same as a packet of cigarettes. An order for 63,000 copies from Woolworths paid for the whole project.

Which seafaring merchants spread a 22-consonant script across the Mediterranean, where other cultures adapted it?

Phoenicians wrote consonants only, leaving readers to supply the vowels. Their script grew out of an older one that was itself derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Which educator taught 300 adult workers to read in 45 days before writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed?

Paulo Freire ran the experiment in Brazil in the early 1960s, his first chance to test his theories on a large scale. He later spent more than a decade in exile from the country.

Which early alphabet primer was a handled wooden paddle with its lesson sheet protected by a translucent layer?

A hornbook was named for the thin sheet of animal horn that shielded the page. Its handle often had a hole for a cord, so a child could wear it hanging from the waist.

Which book is the most translated in the world, with at least part of it in over half of all languages?

The Bible existed in full in only about 50 languages by the early 1800s, so the great bulk of its translations have been made since then.

Which 1965 US law outlawed the literacy tests Southern states used to keep Black citizens from the polls?

The Voting Rights Act struck at devices that Southern states had written into law between 1888 and 1908, alongside poll taxes and property-ownership requirements.

Which Indian state was the first to be recognized as completely literate, a status it gained in 1991?

Kerala won the recognition even though its effective literacy rate at the time was only about 90 percent.

Which Central American country's Sandinista government launched a five-month crusade against illiteracy in 1980?

Nicaragua trained nearly 60,000 students and 30,000 adults in two weeks to do the teaching. UNESCO honored the effort with its Nadezhda K. Krupskaya award.

Which Turkish leader swapped Arabic script for Latin letters in 1928 and toured the country teaching them?

Kemal Atatürk unveiled the plan to linguists and professors in Ankara in spring 1928. One adviser had found that learning to read and write Turkish in the old script took about three years.

Which script, developed in ninth-century Bulgaria at the Preslav Literary School, is named in honor of a saint?

Cyrillic was probably the work of disciples of the brothers Cyril and Methodius. The pair themselves had earlier created a different script, Glagolitic.

Which room in a medieval monastery was set aside for monks to copy and illuminate books by hand?

A scriptorium was rarer than its fame suggests, because only some monasteries had a special room. Monks often did their copying in the library or in their own rooms instead.

Which writing material, made from untanned animal skins, takes its name from the ancient city of Pergamon?

Parchment owes its name to Pergamon because the city was a thriving center of production. A legend that it was invented there is doubted, since it was in use in Anatolia long before.

Which Japanese word, born as slang in the Meiji era, means letting unread books pile up at home?

Tsundoku blends a phrase for piling things up to deal with later and the word for reading books. It can also mean the unread books themselves, waiting on the shelf.

Which Japanese story by lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu is often called the world's first novel?

The Tale of Genji depicts the lives of high courtiers in Heian Japan. Its first-novel label is much debated, because older works from India and the classical world also have a claim.

Which king of Uruk is the hero of the world's oldest surviving work of narrative literature?

Gilgamesh first appears in five Sumerian poems, some perhaps from around 2100 BCE. In the later epic he meets Enkidu, a wild man the gods created to stop him oppressing his people.

Which First Lady's family literacy foundation was partly funded by a book credited to her dog Millie?

Barbara Bush announced the foundation at a White House luncheon six weeks after her husband's inauguration. She ghostwrote Millie's Book herself.

Which Egyptian city housed the ancient world's great library, stocked with scrolls by the Ptolemaic kings?

Alexandria held somewhere between 40,000 and 700,000 scrolls, and nobody knows the true figure. The idea may have come from Demetrius of Phalerum, an exiled Athenian statesman.