50 Fun Facts About Things That Come in Fives

Which of New York City's five boroughs is the only one located mainly on the US mainland?

The Bronx is the only borough joined to the North American mainland. Manhattan and Staten Island are islands, while Brooklyn and Queens sit on the western end of Long Island.

Which animal joins the lion, leopard, elephant and rhinoceros in Africa's 'Big Five' game animals?

African buffalo complete a list that has nothing to do with size. Big-game hunters coined the term for the five animals they found hardest to hunt on foot.

Which of the five Great Lakes is the only one lying entirely inside the United States?

Lake Michigan is the only Great Lake wholly inside the US, since the other four are shared with Canada. That makes it the largest lake by area lying within a single country.

Which party drink's name is said to come from a Hindi word for five, after its five ingredients?

Punch is commonly said to take its name from the Hindi panch, a nod to a recipe of five ingredients. East India Company employees brought the drink back from India to England in the 17th century.

Which of the five Golden Ticket winners in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory falls into the chocolate river?

Augustus Gloop is the first child to leave the tour, sucked up a pipe after tumbling in. The other three badly behaved winners follow, each undone by ignoring Willy Wonka's warnings.

Which of the world's five named oceans is both the smallest and the shallowest?

The Arctic Ocean keeps some sea ice all year and is almost completely covered in winter. Some oceanographers class it as a sea rather than a true ocean.

Which humorous five-line verse form, rhyming AABBA, was popularised by the nonsense poet Edward Lear?

Limerick is a word Edward Lear never used, even though his 1846 Book of Nonsense made the form famous. Lines one, two and five rhyme, as do the shorter third and fourth.

Which author's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novels were billed as a trilogy in five parts?

Douglas Adams kept writing after book three, so the series was sold as a trilogy in four parts and then five. The fifth book's US cover joked that the label was growing ever less accurate.

Which pair of organs has five lobes in total, three on the right side and two on the left?

The lungs are not a matching pair. The left one shares its side of the chest with the heart and has a dent, the cardiac notch, to make room for it.

Which fifth basic taste did Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda identify alongside sweet, sour, salty and bitter?

Umami comes from glutamate, the compound Ikeda traced the savoury taste to in 1908. A year later it went on sale in Japan as Ajinomoto, the first umami seasoning, better known as MSG.

Which of the Five Pillars of Islam is the pilgrimage to Mecca, required once in a lifetime?

Hajj falls in Dhu'l-Hijja, the twelfth and last month of the Islamic calendar. The duty applies only to Muslims who are physically fit and can afford the journey.

Which of the five stages of grief comes first in the model Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced in 1969?

Denial opens a model that Kübler-Ross drew from her work with terminally ill patients. Her book On Death and Dying described people facing their own death, and the stages were only later applied to mourners.

Which country holds a permanent UN Security Council seat alongside China, Russia, the UK and the US?

France has held its permanent seat since the United Nations was founded in 1945. Any one of the five can veto a substantive resolution, however much support it has.

Which member quit the Spice Girls in 1998, cutting the five-piece pop group to four?

Geri Halliwell, the red-haired Ginger of the group, announced through her solicitor that she had left in the middle of a world tour. She returned for the reunion tours of 2007 and 2019.

Which poker hand of five cards outranks every other when no wild cards are in play?

A royal flush is simply the highest straight flush: ace, king, queen, jack and ten of one suit. Only a wild card can beat it, by making five of a kind possible.

Which John Hughes film follows five teenagers from different cliques through a Saturday detention?

The Breakfast Club shuts a nerd, a jock, a loner, a popular girl and a delinquent in together for a whole day. Hughes wrote, produced and directed the 1985 film.

Which of basketball's five positions, known as the one, is usually the shortest player on court?

Point guard is the most specialised of the five roles, often described as a coach on the floor. At 5 ft 3 in, Muggsy Bogues spent 14 NBA seasons playing it.

Which biblical opponent did David face after picking five stones from a brook for his sling?

Goliath was felled by a single slung stone, so David never needed the other four. He then beheaded the fallen giant with the man's own sword.

Which of the five US Army officers promoted to five-star general later served two terms as president?

Dwight Eisenhower was one of four generals raised to five stars in December 1944. Omar Bradley became the fifth and last when he was promoted in 1950.

Which baron, the father of the modern Olympic Games, created the symbol of five interlocking rings?

Pierre de Coubertin drew the rings in 1913 in blue, yellow, black, green and red on white. He said those six colours could reproduce the flag of every country then competing.

Which book closes the five books of the Torah, following Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers?

Deuteronomy takes its name from the Greek for second law. It is framed as a series of speeches by Moses and ends with his death on Mount Nebo.

Which English author created the Famous Five: Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timmy the dog?

Enid Blyton planned only six or eight adventures for the group. Sales were so strong that she ended up writing 21 full-length novels about them.

Which is by far the largest of Central Asia's five former Soviet republics, often called the 'stans'?

Kazakhstan is the world's largest landlocked country and the ninth-largest overall. Its area roughly matches that of Western Europe.

Which of the five Marx Brothers never spoke on screen, honking a horn or whistling instead?

Harpo wore a curly reddish-blond wig in every one of his movie appearances and was the second-oldest of the brothers. Off screen he was an accomplished harpist.

The Pentagon, which has five sides, five floors and five ring corridors, stands in which US state?

Virginia hosts the Pentagon in Arlington County, just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. Its corridors run for 17.5 miles around a five-acre plaza in the middle.

Which of the five Nordic countries is the only one to use the euro as its currency?

Finland joined the eurozone when it launched in 1999. Denmark, Norway and Sweden each kept a krone or krona of their own, and Iceland its króna.

Which country completes the Five Eyes intelligence alliance with Australia, Canada, the UK and the US?

New Zealand and its four partners are bound by the UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence.

Which religion's initiated members wear the Five Ks, including uncut hair, a comb and a steel bracelet?

Sikhism has asked this of its Khalsa since 1699, when Guru Gobind Singh commanded them to wear all five at all times. The other two are an undergarment and a small curved sword.

Which country joined rugby union's Five Nations Championship in 2000, turning it into the Six Nations?

Italy made the tournament six strong, its second growth spurt. It began in 1883 as the four-team Home Nations Championship, the first international rugby union tournament.

Which poetic metre of five feet per line did Shakespeare use in his plays and sonnets?

Iambic pentameter also carries Milton's Paradise Lost and Wordsworth's The Prelude. Each of its five feet is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one.

Which of the five Bennet sisters in Pride and Prejudice runs off with the officer George Wickham?

Lydia is the youngest of the five sisters. Mr Darcy rescues the family's name by paying Wickham's debts and buying him an army commission so that he will marry her.

Which record label launched the Jackson 5, five brothers from Gary, Indiana, to fame in 1969?

Motown made the brothers the first group to debut with four consecutive number ones on the Billboard Hot 100. They left for Epic Records in 1976 without Jermaine.

Which of the five mother sauces of classical cooking is made by heating milk with a butter-and-flour roux?

Béchamel is a white sauce traditionally seasoned with ground nutmeg. The modern list of five probably dates from the 1907 English edition of Auguste Escoffier's cooking guide.

Which is the most distant of the five planets easily seen with the naked eye and known since antiquity?

Saturn marked the edge of the known Solar System until 1781, when William Herschel spotted Uranus and pushed the boundary outward for the first time in history.

Which trait joins openness, conscientiousness, extraversion and agreeableness in psychology's Big Five?

Neuroticism measures proneness to anxiety, irritability and depression. Its initial supplies the N in OCEAN and CANOE, the acronyms students use to remember all five traits.

Which Stoic philosopher was the last of Rome's Five Good Emperors, succeeded by his son Commodus?

Marcus Aurelius broke the run by naming his own son as heir, a choice later judged unfortunate and the start of the empire's decline.

Which combat sport was the fifth and final event of the ancient Olympic pentathlon?

Wrestling closed a contest that was held in a single day. The other four events were a short sprint, the javelin, the discus and the long jump, in an order scholars still debate.

Which scale can be played using only the black keys of a piano?

Pentatonic scales have five notes to the octave, and the black keys form a G-flat major one, which Chopin exploited in his black key étude.

Which of the five Platonic solids has twenty faces, each an equilateral triangle?

The icosahedron stood for water in Plato's Timaeus, which matched the classical elements to regular solids: earth to the cube, air to the octahedron and fire to the tetrahedron.

Which pianist's quartet recorded Take Five, the 1959 jazz standard written in five beats to the bar?

Dave Brubeck led the band, but the tune was composed by his alto saxophonist, Paul Desmond. It appeared on the album Time Out.

Which of the 'Big Five' mass extinctions, known as the Great Dying, was the most severe in Earth's history?

The Permian–Triassic extinction wiped out about 81% of marine species and 70% of land vertebrate species, roughly 252 million years ago.

Which of the Russian composers known as The Five wrote the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition?

Modest Mussorgsky never heard Night on Bald Mountain performed. Mily Balakirev, leader of the group, criticised the piece and refused to conduct it.

The Cinque Terre, a coastal strip of five villages including Vernazza and Manarola, lies in which region?

Liguria's Cinque Terre means Five Lands, and its villages and hillsides form a national park. UNESCO added the area to the World Heritage list in 1997.

Which of New York's Five Families of the Mafia was led by John Gotti, nicknamed the Teflon Don?

The Gambino family fell to Gotti after he orchestrated the murder of its boss, Paul Castellano, in 1985. His own downfall came in 1992, when his underboss cooperated with the FBI.

Which name is given to the pattern of five dots on a die, four in a square and one in the middle?

The quincunx was originally a Roman Republic coin worth five twelfths of an as, the standard bronze coin. Its value was sometimes marked with five dots.

Which member of the Cambridge Five spy ring served as Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures?

Anthony Blunt confessed in secret, and his role stayed hidden until Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher revealed it in November 1979. He was Sir Anthony only until that month.

Which is the oldest of Britain's five Classic horse races, first run in 1776?

The St Leger is run at Doncaster as the final Classic of each flat season. Its first running was on Cantley Common, and it is open to colts and fillies alike.

Which of cycling's five Monuments, raced over rough cobbled roads, is nicknamed the Hell of the North?

Paris–Roubaix owes the nickname to the First World War, not its cobbles. In 1919, organisers and journalists found the route wrecked by four years of shelling and trench warfare.

Which nation was grouped with the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Creek as the 'Five Civilized Tribes'?

The Seminole and the other four were called civilized because they had adopted settlers' customs. All five were still removed from the Southeast, most prominently along the Trail of Tears.

Which of the five primary nucleobases takes the place of thymine when the genetic code is carried by RNA?

Uracil is a demethylated form of thymine, the base it stands in for. Counting both gives biology five primary bases, with adenine, cytosine and guanine shared by DNA and RNA.