40 Fun Facts About Kissing

Which illness, spread through saliva and common among teenagers, is nicknamed the kissing disease?

Mononucleosis is usually caused by the Epstein–Barr virus, which infects most people in childhood, when it produces few or no symptoms.

Kissing which block of limestone, set in an Irish castle's battlements, is said to grant the gift of the gab?

The Blarney Stone can only be reached by leaning over backwards from the parapet at the top of Blarney Castle, near Cork, with iron rails to grip.

Which Grimm heroine wakes when a servant stumbles carrying her coffin, not from the kiss Disney later added?

Snow White revives when the jolt dislodges a piece of poisoned apple from her throat; Disney's 1937 film swapped the stumble for love's first kiss.

A 1945 Life magazine photograph of a sailor kissing a stranger on V-J Day was taken in which New York location?

Times Square was full of crowds celebrating Japan's surrender, and photographer Eisenstaedt said that had the woman worn dark clothes he would have had no picture.

Whose Paris tomb gained a glass barrier in 2011 after years of visitors' lipstick kisses damaged the monument?

Oscar Wilde's admirers left so many lipstick prints at Père Lachaise that the grease soaked in, and each cleaning left the surface more porous.

In which Disney film do two dogs kiss by accident while eating opposite ends of one spaghetti strand?

Lady and the Tramp kept the scene because the animator assigned to it drew it with such tenderness that Walt Disney was won over.

When two kissing gouramis, popular aquarium fish, press their lips together, what are they actually doing?

Fighting is the point: biologists class the lip-lock as ritualised aggression and call it mouth fighting, a contest in which two rivals press their jaws together for a few seconds.

Which superhero hangs upside down in a rainy alley for a famous screen kiss with Mary Jane Watson?

Spider-Man's actor Tobey Maguire found it hard to breathe during the take because the rainwater kept pouring into his nose.

Which Christmas plant, a parasite that grows on the branches of trees, are couples expected to kiss beneath?

Mistletoe once came with a limit: in one version of the custom a berry was plucked for every kiss, and the kissing stopped when the berries ran out.

In the Brothers Grimm's frog tale, the king's daughter breaks the spell not with a kiss but how?

Throwing him at a wall in a fit of fury is what turns him human in the Grimm text; the kiss seems to have arrived later, in English translations.

Which disciple used a kiss in the Garden of Gethsemane to point Jesus out to the men sent to arrest him?

Judas Iscariot's kiss identified Jesus to a crowd carrying swords and clubs, and some churches still mark the betrayal on Spy Wednesday of Holy Week.

The kunik, a greeting made by pressing the nose against a loved one's cheek, belongs to which Arctic people?

Inuit press the nose to the cheek; the nose-to-nose rub that English speakers copied from it is an outsiders' version of the gesture.

Which letter of the alphabet stands for a kiss, not a hug, at the end of a card or text message?

X as a written kiss is old enough that a novel of 1878 mentions letters ending in a row of them, though nobody knows how a cross came to mean a kiss.

Clay tablets from about 2500 BCE, among the earliest records of romantic kissing, come from which region?

Mesopotamia's cuneiform texts pushed the record back about a thousand years: the oldest evidence had been thought to be Indian writings from around 1500 BCE.

Which ancient people had separate words for a kiss on the hand, a kiss between relatives and a kiss of passion?

The Romans called a kiss on the hand or cheek an osculum, a closed-lips kiss between relatives a basium and a passionate one a suavium.

Which pope often knelt to kiss the ground, a gesture begun on reaching a rural parish as a young priest?

John Paul II first knelt that way at the village of Niegowić and repeated it throughout his papacy, having borrowed the gesture from the French saint Jean Vianney.

Pilgrims circling the Kaaba try to kiss a sacred black rock set into its eastern corner in which city?

Mecca's pilgrims are copying a kiss that Islamic tradition says the rock once received from Muhammad; today a silver frame holds its fragments together.

In British slang, a Glasgow kiss is not a show of affection but which sudden blow, usually aimed at the nose?

A headbutt delivered this way usually leaves a broken nose, and Scottish wrestler Drew McIntyre named one of his ring moves the Glasgow Kiss.

The kiss and cry, the area where competitors wait with coaches for their scores, got its name in which sport?

Figure skating got the phrase from Finnish official Jane Erkko, who made it up in 1983 when television technicians asked what the area was called.

Which American chocolate maker has wrapped its bite-sized Kisses in foil with a paper plume since the 1920s?

Hershey's launched Kisses in 1907 and added the paper plume in 1921 as a tiny flag to set them apart from rivals' lookalike chocolates.

Which artist used real gold leaf for The Kiss, a painting of an embracing couple that hangs in Vienna?

Gustav Klimt painted it in 1907 and 1908, at the height of what is called his Golden Period, adding silver and platinum to the gold.

Which sculptor's marble lovers in The Kiss were first designed for his bronze portal The Gates of Hell?

Auguste Rodin first titled the piece Francesca da Rimini, after the noblewoman in Dante's Inferno who falls in love with her husband's younger brother Paolo.

A mural on Berlin's East Side Gallery shows East German leader Erich Honecker kissing which Soviet leader?

Leonid Brezhnev really did kiss Honecker: artist Dmitri Vrubel copied a 1979 photograph taken at East Germany's thirtieth-anniversary celebrations.

Which hormone, tied to bonding between partners and between mothers and babies, is released during a kiss?

Oxytocin strengthens the bond with a partner, and a kiss also sets off endorphins and dopamine, which is why it tends to lift the mood.

Which primates, native to the Congo Basin, are known to kiss one another to restore peace after a quarrel?

Bonobos are also the only animals besides humans that have been seen kissing with their tongues.

Which muscle encircling the mouth, nicknamed the kissing muscle, does the work of puckering the lips?

Orbicularis oris was once thought to be a single ring but is really four interlaced quadrants, and brass players depend on it as much as kissers do.

Which name is given to the scientific study of kissing, a field pursued by Charles Darwin among others?

Philematology dates from the nineteenth century, and its students have included the criminologist Cesare Lombroso as well as Darwin.

Kissing bugs, insects named for feeding around people's mouths, spread the parasite behind which illness?

Chagas disease is passed on not by the bug's saliva but by its droppings, which carry the parasite into the bite wound.

Nichelle Nichols and William Shatner shared a 1968 kiss, long cited as a US television first, on which series?

Star Trek had telekinetic aliens force Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura together in the episode Plato's Stepchildren, though earlier interracial screen kisses have since come to light.

Which inventor's studio filmed The Kiss in 1896, an 18-second reel among the first films shown commercially?

Thomas Edison's crew had actress May Irwin and her stage partner repeat for the camera the closing kiss of their musical The Widow Jones.

Which director stretched one screen kiss in Notorious to over two minutes by breaking it into three-second bursts?

Alfred Hitchcock had Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman keep interrupting the embrace, which slipped it past the Production Code's limit on long kisses.

Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr kiss in the Hawaiian surf in which Best Picture winner of 1953?

From Here to Eternity is set in the months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the adulterous clinch at the water's edge was groundbreaking for its day.

Which film ends with a director watching a reel of all the kisses a village priest once had cut from movies?

Cinema Paradiso's projectionist Alfredo had spliced every censored kiss into a single reel, which the director is handed only after the old man's funeral.

Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams won MTV's Best Kiss award for a rain-soaked embrace in which film?

The Notebook took the prize at the 2005 MTV Movie Awards, and Total Film later ranked the downpour scene fourth among the best movie kisses.

Which musician topped the US chart in 1986 with Kiss, a sparse funk single from the album Parade?

Prince had to insist before his record company would release the stripped-back track, which then spent two weeks at number one.

Whose debut single I Kissed a Girl spent seven weeks at number one in the United States in 2008?

Katy Perry's hit was also counted as the 1,000th number-one song of the rock era on the Billboard Hot 100.

Which pop singer kissed both Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera on stage at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards?

Madonna joined the pair for her single Hollywood after they had sung her earlier hit Like a Virgin, and the kisses became the night's controversy.

Which co-founder of the rock band Kiss performed as the Demon and is known for his unusually long tongue?

Gene Simmons, the band's bassist and co-lead singer, was born Chaim Witz and helped to found the group in New York in 1973.

Consuelo Velázquez, who wrote the standard Bésame Mucho before she had ever been kissed, came from which country?

Mexico's Velázquez said kissing was something she had only heard about, and heard was a sin, when she wrote the bolero whose title asks for many kisses.

Which duo reached number one in the United States in 1981 with Kiss on My List, from the album Voices?

Hall & Oates scored their second American chart-topper with it, four years after Rich Girl had given them their first.