Useless Trivia
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145 free Useless trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
47 free useless trivia questions with answers. This is the trivia that is no use to anyone and impossible to forget. Forty-seven wacky, weird and gloriously useless questions: the army that lost a war to emus, the wave of molasses that flooded Boston, the pope who put a corpse on trial, the CIA's wired-up spy cat, the pig nominated for president, the cat who ran a Japanese railway station and the meat that fell on Kentucky. Most of it is easy to guess and hard to believe, which makes it ideal for parties, icebreakers, road trips or a fun round at quiz night. A few questions are properly hard, so even the person who knows everything will miss one or two. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia's articles on the events, animals and inventions involved, and each question carries its source.
30 of 145 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Roughly how long did the 1896 Anglo-Zanzibar War last?
Under an hour
Under an hour: British warships shelled the sultan's palace for about 38 to 45 minutes, after which Sultan Khalid fled to the German consulate and into exile.
Q 02Which animal is known for leaving cube-shaped droppings?
Wombat
Wombat cubes are stackable and hard to roll away, which is thought to be the point of the shape.
Q 03How many hearts does an octopus have?
Three
Three: two push blood through the gills and one sends it round the body, moving a blue blood that carries oxygen efficiently in cold water.
Q 04What is the name for the dot that sits above a lowercase i or j?
Tittle
Tittle: the word survives in 'jot or tittle', and 'to a T' is thought to be short for 'to a tittle', a phrase recorded in 1607, long before the shorter form.
Q 05Which video game company began in Kyoto in 1889 as a maker of handmade playing cards?
Nintendo
Nintendo: craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi started out selling hanafuda, the flower cards, and the firm released its first home video game machines only in 1977.
Q 06In heraldry, the unicorn is the emblem of which country?
Scotland
Scotland: the unicorn is its national animal, and when James VI inherited the English throne in 1603 his new arms paired it with England's lion, as the royal arms still do.
Q 07Which planet of the Solar System has an average density lower than water?
Saturn
Saturn would float in a big enough bathtub: its average density is about 0.69 g/cm3, roughly 30 percent below water.
Q 08Which packaging material was born in 1957 when two inventors tried to make textured plastic wallpaper?
Bubble wrap
Bubble wrap: Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes sealed two shower curtains together, trapping air bubbles; it flopped as wallpaper and as greenhouse insulation before IBM used it to protect computers in transit.
Q 09Which website's first sale, in 1995, was a broken laser pointer?
eBay
eBay: Pierre Omidyar listed the pointer on the site he had built over Labor Day weekend, then called AuctionWeb, and to his surprise it sold for $14.83.
Q 10Which search engine began in 1996 as a Stanford research project called BackRub?
Google: Larry Page and Sergey Brin's engine ranked pages by the links pointing back to them, hence BackRub; the later name plays on googol, a 1 followed by 100 zeros.
Q 11What sort of creature is Sir Nils Olav III, the knighted Norwegian military mascot living at Edinburgh Zoo?
A king penguin
A king penguin: the Norwegian King's Guard adopted its first Nils Olav on a 1972 visit to Edinburgh, and promotions passed down to his successors have made Nils Olav III a major general.
Q 12A clay tablet sent to the merchant Ea-nasir in Ur around 1750 BC complains about his delivery of what?
Copper
Copper: a customer named Nanni complained that the ingots were not the fine quality promised; Ea-nasir traded the metal from the Persian Gulf, and not always the best of it.
Q 13The world's shortest scheduled flight, about 1.7 miles, links Westray and Papa Westray in which archipelago?
The Orkney Islands
Q 21What fell from the sky over Bath County, Kentucky, for several minutes in March 1876?
Chunks of meat
Chunks of meat: locals blamed vultures disgorging their meal in flight, still the favoured explanation, and two men who tasted the flakes judged them mutton or venison.
Q 22Gary Dahl became a millionaire in 1975 selling what for just under $4 each?
Pet Rocks
Pet Rocks came in a cardboard carrier with air holes and a spoof training manual, an idea Dahl hatched in a bar as friends griped about their pets.
Q 23Andre Geim, who won a spoof science prize in 2000 for levitating a frog, went on to win what in 2010?
A Nobel in physics
The Orkney Islands: Loganair's hop takes about two minutes including taxiing, with a record of 53 seconds, and locals such as teachers and the vet use it as a lifeline.
Q 14Beating a Welsh village, the 85-letter longest place name in an English-speaking country belongs to a hill in which country?
New Zealand
New Zealand: the Maori name of the 305-metre hill, shortened to Taumata, means the summit where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, played his flute to his loved one.
Q 15In 1932 the Australian Army deployed soldiers with Lewis machine guns against which animal, and lost?
Emus
Emus split into small, mobile groups; the commander compared them to tanks and the cull was abandoned.
Q 16A wave of what killed 21 people in Boston's North End in January 1919?
Molasses
Molasses from a burst storage tank rushed through the streets; residents said the neighbourhood still smelled sweet on hot days decades later.
Q 17In 1814 a burst vat in London sent a flood of which drink through a slum, killing eight?
Porter
Porter: a giant vat of the dark beer burst at Meux's Horse Shoe Brewery by Tottenham Court Road, and the inquest ruled the deaths an accident, so the brewery paid no compensation.
Q 18What did Frau Troffea start doing in a Strasbourg street in July 1518 that dozens of others then joined?
Dancing
Dancing: the council heeded physicians who blamed 'overheated blood' and paid dozens of musicians to keep the dancers moving until they recovered; stress-induced mass hysteria is the favoured modern explanation.
Q 19Which 1859 US-British standoff is named after its only casualty, shot in a settler's garden?
Pig War
The Pig War: settler Lyman Cutlar shot a Hudson's Bay Company pig on San Juan Island, troops and warships gathered, and a British admiral refused to fight 'over a squabble about a pig'.
Q 20In 897, Pope Stephen VI put whom on trial in Rome, propped up on a throne?
His dead predecessor's corpse
His dead predecessor's corpse: Formosus had been dead about nine months; a deacon answered for him, and after the guilty verdict the body was stripped of its vestments and thrown in the Tiber.
A Nobel in physics, for graphene, the one-atom-thick carbon that he and Konstantin Novoselov first peeled from pencil graphite using ordinary sticky tape.
Q 24After 'Boaty McBoatface' won a 2016 public vote to name a polar research ship, what was the ship actually called?
RRS Sir David Attenborough
RRS Sir David Attenborough: ministers overruled the poll although Boaty drew 124,109 votes, over ten times Attenborough's, and gave the Boaty name to one of the ship's remotely operated submarines.
Q 25Stubbs, honorary mayor of the small town of Talkeetna from 1997 to 2017, was what kind of animal?
A cat
A cat: Stubbs kept his 'mayoral office' at Nagley's General Store and each afternoon drank catnip-laced water from a stemmed glass at a nearby restaurant.
Q 26Which Roman emperor reportedly planned to make his favourite horse, Incitatus, a consul?
Caligula
Caligula: Suetonius says Incitatus had a marble stall, an ivory manger and purple blankets, but only that the emperor planned the consulship; the horse never held it.
Q 27According to chroniclers, how did several German nobles die at a royal assembly in Erfurt in 1184?
Drowned in a cesspit
Drowned in a cesspit: the hall floor gave way under the crowd and dropped them into the latrine pit below, while the monarch, sitting in a window alcove, was spared and brought down by ladder.
Q 28The WWII 'bat bomb' idea came from a Pennsylvania dentist after a visit to which national park?
Carlsbad Caverns
Carlsbad Caverns: dentist Lytle Adams, impressed by its bat colonies, sent the idea to the White House in January 1942; each bomb casing held more than a thousand bats carrying tiny timed incendiaries.
Q 29Which agency's 1960s 'Acoustic Kitty' project surgically wired a cat as a walking listening device?
The CIA
The CIA: a vet implanted a microphone in the cat's ear and a transmitter at the base of its skull, but the agency judged trained cats impractical and dropped the idea in 1967.
Q 30B. F. Skinner's WWII 'Project Pigeon' trained birds to do what?
Guide bombs by pecking a screen
Guide bombs by pecking a screen: Skinner trained the birds with grain to peck at a ship's image, and inside the nose cone their pecks on the screen steered the missile toward it.