Obscure Trivia
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109 free Obscure trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Obscure trivia is the stuff that never comes up in a normal pub quiz: the Roman emperor who bought the throne at an auction, the penguin who is a knighted colonel in the Norwegian army, the pope whose 13-day reign produced the first public smoking ban, the runner who finished an Olympic marathon 54 years late, and the state capital with no McDonald's. These questions are meant to be missed on first hearing and remembered forever after. The set is deliberately mixed. You will find forgotten history, odd geography and micronations, science and space, animals with strange abilities, food origins, art thefts, sports records and a few anthem and language curiosities. Most sit at hard or expert difficulty, but a handful of easier surprises are included so nobody goes scoreless. It suits quiz hosts who want a round that stumps regulars, and anyone who collects little-known facts. Every answer was checked against an encyclopaedia or primary page and each question shows its source, so the strangest facts here are ones you can defend when someone at the table says 'that can't be right'.
30 of 109 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which San Francisco resident declared himself 'Emperor of these United States' in 1859?
Joshua Norton
Joshua Norton was a bankrupt rice speculator when he made the claim. San Francisco played along: restaurants honoured the notes he printed, and some 10,000 people filed past his body when he died in 1880.
Q 02Which group murdered the emperor Pertinax and auctioned his throne in AD 193?
The Praetorian Guard
The Praetorian Guard, the emperor's own bodyguard, sold the throne to the senator Didius Julianus. He was killed 66 days later as Septimius Severus marched on Rome, and Severus dismissed the Guard.
Q 03Kongō Gumi, described as the world's oldest documented company, was founded in AD 578 to build what?
Buddhist temples
Buddhist temples were its trade for some 1,400 years, starting with Shitennō-ji in what is now Osaka. The family firm lost its independence in 2006, when debt forced its sale to Takamatsu Construction.
Q 04Sir Nils Olav, colonel-in-chief of the Norwegian King's Guard, is what kind of animal?
A penguin
A penguin: the King's Guard adopted a king penguin at Edinburgh Zoo in 1972, and its return visits have brought him promotions and, in 2008, a knighthood. The name has passed down through three birds.
Q 05The self-declared Principality of Sealand sits on what kind of offshore structure?
A wartime sea fort
A wartime sea fort: Britain built Roughs Tower off its east coast in World War II to fend off enemy mine-laying aircraft. Pirate-radio broadcaster Roy Bates occupied the decommissioned fort in 1967 and declared it a principality.
Q 06Canada and Denmark's decades-long 'Whisky War' was a friendly dispute over which Arctic land?
Hans Island
Hans Island is a barren rock midway between the two countries' Arctic coasts. Each side's visitors planted a flag and left a bottle of whisky or schnapps, until a 2022 deal split it and gave them a shared land border.
Q 07Ernest Vincent Wright's 1939 novel Gadsby famously avoids which letter for 50,000 words?
E
E was kept out by force: Wright tied down that type-bar on his typewriter so none could slip in. He said the hardest part was the past tense, since nearly every verb ending in '-ed' was off limits.
Q 08Which king called smoking 'loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose' in a 1604 pamphlet against tobacco?
James I
James I wrote 'A Counterblaste to Tobacco' the year after he took the English throne, then slapped a heavy import duty on the leaf. His subjects kept smoking, and the Crown collected the duties.
Q 09Roughly how long did Shizo Kanakuri take to finish the slowest Olympic marathon on record?
54 years
54 years: beaten by the heat at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, he stopped at a local family's home and dropped out. He was invited back in 1967, in his seventies, to cross the line.
Q 10Which Grand Slam staged tennis's longest match, won 70–68 in the fifth set in 2010?
Wimbledon
Wimbledon had no fifth-set tie-break then, so John Isner and Nicolas Mahut played on for 11 hours 5 minutes over three days. The tournament added a final-set tie-break in 2019.
Q 11Why was cricket's last 'timeless' Test, in Durban in 1939, abandoned as a draw?
England had a ship to catch
England had a ship to catch: at 654 for 5 they were just 42 short of the 696 they needed when they had to leave or miss the boat home. Cricket has not staged a timeless Test since.
Q 12In 1985, computer maker Symbolics was first to register what?
.com domain
A .com domain: symbolics.com was registered on 15 March 1985, and only five more .com addresses followed that year. The computer maker later went bankrupt, but its address lived on and was sold in 2009.
Q 13What did the first ever SMS text message, sent over the Vodafone network in December 1992, say?
Merry Christmas
Q 21Which is the only US state capital with neither a McDonald's nor a Starbucks?
Montpelier
Montpelier has only about 8,000 residents, the fewest of any state capital, and its downtown is given over to small, locally owned businesses rather than national chains.
Q 22Decades before Texas, which US state was a de facto independent republic for 14 years, with its own coinage?
Vermont
Vermont went its own way in 1777 because New York and New Hampshire both claimed its land. Its founders banned adult slavery, and in 1791 it joined the Union as the 14th state.
Q 23Which Asian country is 'doubly landlocked', meaning every one of its neighbours is landlocked too?
Uzbekistan
'Merry Christmas' went from engineer Neil Papworth to Richard Jarvis, a Vodafone director who was at a Christmas party with a newly launched Orbitel phone. Jarvis did not text back.
Q 14Which keyboard symbol did Spanish merchants once use for the arroba, a weight of about 25 pounds?
The at sign (@)
The at sign (@) was ledger shorthand for the arroba, which is why Spanish and Portuguese speakers still call the symbol by that name. Ray Tomlinson borrowed it for email addresses in 1971.
Q 15The distress signal SOS was first adopted in 1905 by which country, while British ships still sent CQD?
Germany
Germany wrote the signal into its radio rules in 1905 because three dots, three dashes, three dots makes a distinctive pattern in Morse code. The letters stand for nothing: 'save our souls' was coined later.
Q 16Which country's national anthem has the oldest lyrics of any, taken from a poem more than 1,000 years old?
Japan
Japan's 'Kimigayo' takes its words from an anonymous poem in a 10th-century anthology, but its tune dates only from 1880, and it did not become the country's legal national anthem until 1999.
Q 17Along with Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, which country's national anthem has no official lyrics?
Spain
Spain's 'Marcha Real' leaves its athletes to hum along: 'la, la, la', as the head of its Olympic Committee put it. His 2007 competition to find words drew thousands of entries, but none was adopted.
Q 18Which country's national anthem is the only one still set to the melody of Britain's 'God Save the King'?
Liechtenstein
Liechtenstein adopted the tune when it was common property in central Europe: Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony and Switzerland all sang their own words to it. The Swiss dropped it in 1961; the principality kept it.
Q 19The ngultrum, pegged to India's rupee, is which country's currency?
Bhutan
Bhutan launched the ngultrum in 1974 at par with the Indian rupee, which is accepted alongside it: the economy is tied closely to India's through trade and monetary links.
Q 20Which Pacific islands did Captain Cook name the 'Friendly Islands'?
Tonga
Tonga earned the name for its warm welcome in the 1770s, yet by an account published decades later some of its chiefs plotted to kill Cook during an entertainment in his honour and held back only because they could not agree on a plan.
Uzbekistan's five neighbours are all landlocked too, so anything it exports must cross at least two borders to reach an ocean. Only one other country in the world is in the same position.
Q 24Which country sits atop a sunken 'eighth continent' that lies 94 percent under the Pacific?
New Zealand
New Zealand and New Caledonia are the main parts of Zealandia still above water. The rest sank as its crust stretched thin while it pulled away from Gondwana, roughly 80 million years ago.
Q 25The oldest known pieces of Earth, 4.4-billion-year-old crystals from the Jack Hills, are grains of which mineral?
Zircon
Zircon is almost indestructible, and it traps radioactive atoms that decay into lead at a known rate, so every grain carries its own clock. The Jack Hills grains outlasted the rocks they first grew in.
Q 26Lake Hillier, long famous for its bubble-gum pink water, lies on an island off which country?
Australia
Australia's Lake Hillier owes its colour to salt-loving microbes. A deluge in 2022 diluted the salt and the pink faded, though scientists expect it to return as the water level drops.
Q 27Which vertebrate has the longest known lifespan, estimated at anywhere from 272 to more than 500 years?
Greenland shark
The Greenland shark was aged by carbon-dating the lenses of its eyes: of 28 sharks tested, the oldest was put at about 392 years, give or take 120. The species is not ready to breed until it is around 150.
Q 28Which microscopic eight-legged animals have survived direct exposure to the vacuum of outer space?
Tardigrades
Tardigrades, or water bears, spent days exposed to open space on a European satellite flight in 2007 and revived back on Earth. Their trick is to dry out into a dormant state that also resists radiation and deep cold.
Q 29The male platypus, one of very few venomous mammals, delivers its venom from where?
Spurs on its hind feet
Spurs on its hind feet are fed by a venom gland in each upper leg. Output peaks in the mating season, so the venom is thought to be a weapon against rival males; a sting is agonising for a person but not lethal.
Q 30How do frigatebirds sleep on ocean trips that last for weeks?
In short naps on the wing
In short naps on the wing: brain recordings caught them dozing in bursts as they circled upward on rising air, often with half the brain awake. It added up to about 40 minutes a day, a fraction of their sleep on land.