96 Fun Facts About Fill in the Blank

Which city fills the blank: 'The capital of Australia is ____'?

Canberra was chosen under a constitutional rule that the capital sit in New South Wales at least 100 miles from Sydney, and Parliament met in Melbourne until moving there in 1927.

Which sea fills the blank: 'The River Danube empties into the ____'?

Black Sea; communist Romania made political prisoners dig a canal linking the Danube to it in the early 1950s, and the project became known as the Canal of Death.

Which country fills the blank: 'Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest peak, stands in ____'?

Tanzania; the German Hans Meyer named the summit Kaiser-Wilhelm-Spitze after his emperor, but it has since been renamed Uhuru Peak, Swahili for Freedom Peak.

Which country fills the blank: 'The world's smallest sovereign state by area is ____'?

Vatican City became a sovereign state only in 1929, when the Lateran Pacts with Mussolini's Italy ended a 60-year standoff that began when Italy seized the Papal States.

Which country fills the blank: 'The Strait of Gibraltar separates Spain from ____'?

Morocco lies across the strait from Spain; Gibraltar's name comes from Jabal Tariq, the mountain of Tariq, the commander who crossed from Africa to invade Iberia.

Which name fills the blank: 'Magna Carta was sealed in 1215 by King ____ of England'?

John sealed Magna Carta to make peace with his rebel barons, but the charter failed and civil war broke out within three months.

Which word fills the blank: 'Asked when East Germany's new border rules took effect, Günter Schabowski said: effective ____'?

Immediately, he said after a pause, and that night crowds mobbed the Berlin Wall's checkpoints until, within hours, border guards let them through.

Which word fills the blank: 'The Great Fire of London started on ____ Lane'?

Pudding Lane was where the fire broke out on Thomas Farriner's premises, yet a French watchmaker, Robert Hubert, confessed to starting it and was hanged at Tyburn.

Which word fills the blank: 'The Treaty of Versailles was signed in the palace's Hall of ____'?

Mirrors; Bismarck had proclaimed the German Empire in that hall in 1871, so France, bent on avenging that defeat, had Germany sign the 1919 peace there.

Which country fills the blank: 'The ancient city of Carthage stood in what is now ____'?

Tunisia; Rome burned Carthage to the ground in 146 BC, then rebuilt it a century later as the leading Roman city of its African province.

Which symbol fills the blank: 'The chemical symbol for gold is ____'?

Au, from the Latin aurum; gold lies pure as nuggets in stream beds, which is why it was among the first metals people worked.

Which mineral fills the blank: 'On the Mohs scale, the hardest natural material is ____'?

Diamond is so hard that the toughest ones can be scratched only by other diamonds, yet graphite, made of the same pure carbon, is soft enough for pencils.

Which organelle fills the blank: 'The powerhouse of the cell is the ____'?

Mitochondrion; it carries its own DNA, passed down from mothers, so scientists use it to trace ancestry along the maternal line.

Which word fills the blank: 'The bones of the middle ear are the malleus, the incus and the ____'?

Stapes, Latin for stirrup, passes vibrations into the inner ear, so when abnormal bone growth leaves it stuck in place, hearing becomes impaired.

Which unit fills the blank: 'The SI unit of electric current is the ____'?

Ampere honours André-Marie Ampère, who showed that two parallel wires carrying current attract or repel each other, depending on which way the currents flow.

Which city fills the blank: 'The 2016 Summer Olympics were held in ____'?

Rio de Janeiro's Games included Yusra Mardini, a Syrian refugee who a year earlier had swum for hours beside a sinking dinghy to reach Greece, competing under the Olympic flag.

Which word fills the blank: 'In tennis, a score of zero is called ____'?

Love, as a score, probably comes from playing for love, meaning playing for nothing, with no stakes riding on the game.

Which word fills the blank: 'The 1908 Olympic marathon began at ____ Castle'?

Windsor Castle was the start and the royal box the finish, and that course's odd 26 miles 385 yards became the marathon standard in 1921.

Which league fills the blank: 'The Stanley Cup is awarded each year to the playoff champion of the ____'?

NHL champions each get a day with the Stanley Cup, and after the New York Rangers won in 1994, Kentucky Derby winner Go for Gin stuck his head in it to eat.

Which colour fills the blank: 'The overall leader of the Tour de France wears a ____ jersey'?

Yellow; Eugène Christophe, officially its first wearer, led that post-war Tour by nearly half an hour until his fork broke on the penultimate stage and he lost.

Which name fills the blank: 'The 1997 epic historical romance Titanic was written and directed by ____'?

James Cameron gave up his $8 million directing fee and his share of the initial profits as Titanic's budget ballooned toward $200 million.

Which name fills the blank: 'In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy's dog is named ____'?

Toto exposes the Wizard as a humbug in both versions: in Baum's book he tips over a screen, and in the 1939 film he pulls back a curtain.

Which name fills the blank: 'Black Panther rules the fictional African nation of ____'?

Wakanda hides its vibranium-powered technology by posing as a poor, undeveloped nation, until in the 2018 film T'Challa reveals the truth at the United Nations.

Which name fills the blank: 'The Godfather was adapted from a 1969 novel by ____'?

Mario Puzo wrote it for the money while in debt, working from research rather than any personal experience of the Mafia.

Which name fills the blank: 'The Simpsons live in the town of ____'?

Springfield came from the town in the sitcom Father Knows Best, and Matt Groening liked that it was so common a US city name that everyone would think it was their Springfield.

Which city fills the blank: 'The Beatles formed in the English city of ____'?

Liverpool record-shop manager Brian Epstein stuck with the Beatles as label after label turned them down, until EMI's Parlophone signed them.

Which word fills the blank: 'The choral finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is known as the Ode to ____'?

Joy became Freedom when Leonard Bernstein conducted the Ninth in Berlin after the Wall fell in 1989, swapping Schiller's word Freude for Freiheit.

Which word fills the blank: 'Pianoforte comes from Italian for soft and ____'?

Loud; pianoforte shortens an Italian name meaning harpsichord with soft and loud, because unlike the harpsichord it could vary its volume with the player's touch.

Which island fills the blank: 'Bob Marley was born in the village of Nine Mile on ____'?

Jamaica's Smile Jamaica concert, meant to calm political violence, went ahead with Bob Marley on stage two days after gunmen shot him at his Kingston home.

Which name fills the blank: 'The dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was written by ____'?

George Orwell finished it on the remote Scottish island of Jura while battling tuberculosis, and he died in January 1950, months after it came out.

Which word fills the blank: 'Bilbo Baggins lives in a hobbit-hole called Bag ____'?

End, as in Bag End: Bilbo came home from his adventure to find he had been presumed dead and his belongings up for auction.

Which word fills the blank: 'Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B ____ Street'?

Baker Street's Abbey National building society got so many letters addressed to Sherlock Holmes that it employed a full-time secretary to answer them.

Which word fills the blank in the opening of Pride and Prejudice: 'It is a truth universally ____'?

Acknowledged: the line says a rich single man must want a wife, and the next adds that local families already see a newcomer as the rightful property of one of their daughters.

Which name fills the blank: 'Don Quixote was written by ____'?

Miguel de Cervantes was beaten to his own sequel by a fake Part Two in 1614, so in his real one Don Quixote refuses to set foot in Zaragoza, where the impostor had gone for the jousts.

Which word fills the blank: 'Sushi rice is seasoned with ____'?

Vinegar lets cooks make sushi to eat at once; the earliest sushi was fish left in fermenting rice for months, and that rice was thrown away.

Which fruit fills the blank: 'Guacamole is a dip based on ____'?

Avocado history turned on one tree: postman Rudolph Hass planned to cut his seedling down after grafts failed, yet it was spared, and every Hass avocado descends from it.

Which flower fills the blank: 'The spice saffron comes from the red stigmas of a ____'?

Crocus stigmas must be separated from each flower by hand, and those laborious hours, about 150 flowers per gram, are what make saffron so expensive.

Which word fills the blank: 'Tofu is made by pressing the curds of coagulated ____ milk'?

Soy milk curdles into tofu, and Benjamin Franklin, curious about this Chinese bean cheese, asked a merchant who had lived in China how it was made and mailed his answer to John Bartram in 1770.

Which word fills the blank: 'Hummus is a Levantine dip made from cooked, mashed ____ blended with tahini, lemon juice and garlic'?

Chickpeas are at the heart of a hummus war over who owns the dish, as Lebanese and Israeli chefs kept outdoing each other for the record of the world's largest plate.

Which animal fills the blank: 'The largest animal known to have ever existed is the ____'?

Blue whales are the largest animals on record, yet they live almost entirely on krill, which they strain from huge gulps of seawater through baleen plates.

Which word fills the blank: 'A young kangaroo is called a ____'?

Joey births can be put on hold: a mother kangaroo can pause her next embryo's development until the joey already in her pouch moves out.

Which animal fills the blank: 'The fastest land animal is the ____'?

Cheetahs are built for sprinting rather than fighting, so lions and hyenas often bully them away from prey they have just caught.

Which country fills the blank: 'The flightless kiwi bird is native to ____'?

New Zealand's kiwi, DNA studies suggest, are closer kin to Madagascar's extinct elephant birds than to the moa that shared their islands.

Which animal fills the blank: 'The ____ has three hearts and blue blood'?

Octopus blood is blue because it carries oxygen with a copper-based protein, which works better than our iron-based haemoglobin in cold, oxygen-poor water.

Which gadget fills the blank: 'Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone as a phone, an internet communicator and a widescreen ____'?

iPod, phone and internet communicator all sat behind a screen Jobs had switched from plastic to glass after a prototype he carried in his pocket got scratched.

Which name fills the blank: 'The programming language ____ was created by Guido van Rossum'?

Python began as Guido van Rossum's hobby project for the week around Christmas 1989, and he took the name from the comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Which mythical creature fills the blank: 'Scotland's national animal, shown on its royal arms, is the ____'?

The unicorn was believed to be the natural enemy of the lion, a symbol English royals had adopted about a century earlier. Two unicorns supported Scotland's royal arms before 1603.

Which fruit fills the blank: 'To a botanist the ____ is a true berry, while the strawberry and raspberry are not'?

The banana qualifies because a botanical berry is a fleshy fruit grown from a single flower with one ovary. Grapes, tomatoes and cucumbers count too.

Which word fills the blank: 'Geese gather in a gaggle, while the traditional name for a group of crows is a ____'?

A murder is the fanciful collective name for crows. Geese are just as fussy: a gaggle on the ground becomes a skein, a team or a wedge once it takes to the air.

Which animals fill the blank: 'With forelimbs adapted as wings, ____ are the only mammals able to truly fly'?

Bats truly fly, while flying squirrels, colugos and sugar gliders can only glide. A bat's wing is a thin membrane stretched over long, spread-out finger bones.

Which planet fills the blank: 'An intense greenhouse effect makes ____ the hottest planet in the Solar System'?

Venus averages about 464 °C at its surface, hotter than Mercury, even though it orbits nearly twice as far from the Sun. Its dense air is 96.5% carbon dioxide.

Which plant fills the blank: 'Real wasabi is costly and scarce, so ____ dyed green is widely used in its place'?

Horseradish belongs to the same plant family as wasabi, and the common stand-in paste blends it with mustard, starch and green food colouring.

Which word fills the blank: 'Before pumpkins took over, a Halloween jack-o'-____ was carved from a turnip or rutabaga'?

The lantern's name is said to come from the Irish legend of Stingy Jack, a drunkard doomed to roam the Earth with only a hollowed turnip to light his way.

Which fruit fills the blank: 'When James Naismith invented basketball, the first goals were a pair of ____ baskets'?

Peach baskets were what a janitor brought when Naismith asked for a pair of boxes. Their bottoms were left intact, so the ball had to be fetched by hand after every score.

Which bird fills the blank: 'In ten-pin bowling, three strikes in a row are known as a ____'?

A turkey is three strikes in a row, while two make a double. Keep the run going and bowlers call six a wild turkey and nine a golden turkey.

Which word fills the blank in the title of the Dr. Seuss book starring Sam-I-am: 'Green Eggs and ____'?

Ham completes a title Dr. Seuss wrote on a $50 bet with his editor, who doubted he could write an engaging children's book using only 50 different words.

Which gas fills the blank: 'The air around us is not mostly oxygen: about 78 percent of dry air is ____'?

Nitrogen makes up about 78% of dry air and oxygen about 21%. Argon is the surprise third at 0.93%, far ahead of carbon dioxide at 0.04%.

Which tree fills the blank: 'Koalas doze twenty hours a day because their diet of ____ leaves gives so little energy'?

Eucalyptus leaves are low in calories and laced with toxic compounds that deter most other mammals from eating them, so a koala spends most of its life resting.

Which name fills the blank: 'Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed in the Apollo 11 lunar module ____'?

Eagle carried the pair down while Michael Collins stayed in orbit aboard the command module Columbia. Eagle's descent stage was left behind and still sits on the surface.

Which museum fills the blank: 'Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, stolen by a museum worker in 1911, hangs in the ____'?

The Louvre lost the painting for two years after employee Vincenzo Peruggia, who had helped build its glass case, walked off with it. The theft helped make the portrait world-famous.

Which herb fills the blank: 'A traditional pizza Margherita is topped with tomatoes, mozzarella and fresh ____ leaves'?

Basil gives the pizza the green of Italy's flag, beside red tomato and white mozzarella, a colour match that popular legend says inspired the recipe.

Which civilisation fills the blank: 'Machu Picchu, a 15th-century citadel high in Peru's Andes, was built by the ____'?

The Inca built it around 1450, probably as an estate for the emperor Pachacuti. The wider world barely knew of it until Hiram Bingham drew attention to the ruins in 1911.

Which month fills the blank: 'Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC on a date known as the Ides of ____'?

March's Ides fell on the 15th, and it was already a day of reckoning: in Rome, debt payments and rents came due on the Ides of every month.

Which name fills the blank: 'The red-nosed reindeer created in 1939 for a Montgomery Ward booklet is called ____'?

Rudolph beat Rollo and Reginald, two other names his creator Robert L. May weighed for the reindeer. The department store gave out 2.4 million copies of the story in its first year.

Which chess piece fills the blank: 'Moving two squares one way and one sideways, the ____ can jump over other pieces'?

The knight is worth more in closed positions, where its leap carries it over blockades. In open positions bishops are generally the more valuable pieces.

Which word fills the blank in the title of the film that introduced Indiana Jones: 'Raiders of the Lost ____'?

The Ark is the Ark of the Covenant, which the archaeologist races Nazi forces to recover in 1936 because it is said to make an army invincible.

Which material fills the blank: 'Unlike bony fish, sharks and rays have skeletons made of ____ and connective tissue'?

Cartilage is flexible and durable yet only about half as dense as bone, which trims the weight a shark has to haul through the water.

Which bird fills the blank in the title of Harper Lee's novel about lawyer Atticus Finch: 'To Kill a ____'?

To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, during its 41st week on the bestseller list, an award that stunned Harper Lee.

Which desert fills the blank: 'Parts of Chile's ____, the driest non-polar desert, have never recorded any rain'?

The Atacama lies in a double rain shadow between the Andes and the Chilean Coast Range, and its soil is so barren that instruments bound for Mars are tested there.

Which surname fills the blank: 'In April 1961 the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri ____ became the first human in space'?

Gagarin flew under the call sign Kedr, the Russian for cedar, and completed a single orbit of the Earth aboard Vostok 1.

Which instrument fills the blank: 'A classical string quartet is made up of two violins, a viola and a ____'?

The cello holds the quartet's bass line alone. The line-up settled in the 1760s, once composers stopped writing a keyboard part to fill in underneath.

Which word fills the blank: 'Unlike a moth's pupa, a butterfly's is not wrapped in a cocoon and is called a ____'?

Chrysalis is usually traced to an ancient word for gold, after the metallic sheen on the pupae of many butterflies.

Which name fills the blank: 'Elvis Presley's Memphis mansion, opened to the public as a museum in 1982, is called ____'?

Graceland drew about 600,000 visitors a year as of 2024, second among homes in the United States only to the White House. Presley bought it in 1957 for $102,500.

Which position fills the blank: 'Harry Potter joins Gryffindor's Quidditch team as its youngest ____ in a century'?

The Seeker has a single job, catching the Golden Snitch, which earns the team 150 points and stops the match at once.

Which fish fills the blank: 'Vegetarians beware: Worcestershire sauce is a fermented condiment made with ____'?

Anchovies are why food made with the sauce may carry a fish warning and why fish-free versions are sold. Two pharmacists in the city of Worcester invented it.

Which word fills the blank: 'Hailed as the ninth planet in 1930, Pluto has been classed since 2006 as a ____ planet'?

Dwarf status followed the 2005 discovery of Eris, a more massive body in the same distant region, which pushed astronomers to define formally what counts as a planet.

Which language fills the blank: 'The Rosetta Stone gives one decree in hieroglyphs, in Demotic and in Ancient ____'?

Greek was the way in: scholars could already read it, which let Jean-François Champollion work out the Egyptian scripts and announce his breakthrough in Paris in 1822.

Which city fills the blank: 'Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet opens with a brawl between Montagues and Capulets in ____'?

Verona's Prince Escalus, who threatens death for any further brawling, takes his name from Bartolomeo della Scala, a real ruler of the city.

Which country fills the blank: 'ABBA won the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest with the song Waterloo for ____'?

Sweden's winners built their name from the first letters of the four members' first names: Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid.

Which science fills the blank: 'Marie Curie won Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, physics and ____'?

Chemistry brought her second prize in 1911, for discovering radium and polonium. She is still the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields.

Which animal fills the blank: 'Alongside four species of echidna, the ____ is the only living mammal that lays eggs'?

The platypus looked so unlikely that British scientists first suspected a hoax. The male is odd in another way too: a spur on each hind foot delivers painful venom.

Which word fills the blank: 'A word or phrase that reads the same backwards as forwards, like racecar, is a ____'?

A palindrome can be a date as well as a word, such as 22/02/2022. The longest one-word example in the Oxford English Dictionary is James Joyce's 12-letter tattarrattat.

Which word fills the blank in the title of Johannes Vermeer's painting in The Hague: 'Girl with a Pearl ____'?

Girl with a Pearl Earring is not a portrait at all but a tronie, the 17th-century Dutch name for a painted 'head' that was never meant to record a real sitter.

Which country fills the blank: 'The first FIFA World Cup, played in 1930, was both hosted and won by ____'?

Uruguay was picked as host because it was marking the centenary of its first constitution, and then beat Argentina 4–2 in the final.

Which cheese fills the blank: 'Tiramisu covers coffee-soaked ladyfingers with a cream of egg yolks, sugar and ____'?

Mascarpone is a fairly recent addition to a dessert whose Italian name, tirami su, means 'pick me up' or 'cheer me up'.

Which planet fills the blank: 'The Great Red Spot is a giant storm that has been watched since 1831 on ____'?

Jupiter's spot is the largest anticyclonic storm in the Solar System. Its red-orange colour is put down to high-altitude chemicals 'sunburnt' by solar radiation.

Which word fills the blank: 'The small dot printed above a lowercase letter i or j is properly called a ____'?

A tittle is why English speaks of getting every 'jot and tittle' right: the pairing appears in the King James Bible, where it stands for the smallest details of a written law.

Which word fills the blank: 'Each tip of a shoelace is wrapped in a plastic or metal sheath known as the ____'?

The aglet stops the lace from unravelling, and its firm, narrow shape makes the lace easier to hold and to feed through the holes of a shoe.

Which name fills the blank: 'After Waterloo, Napoleon was exiled for good to the remote Atlantic island of Saint ____'?

Saint Helena lies 1,860 km from the nearest major landmass. Napoleon's first exile, on Elba, had been just 10 km off the Tuscan coast, and he escaped within ten months.

Which word fills the blank: 'The giant stone figures carved by the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island are called ____'?

The moai are often thought of as heads, but they have bodies too: many of the most photographed ones stand buried to their shoulders on the slopes of Rano Raraku.

Which country fills the blank: 'The croissant was inspired by the kipferl, a crescent-shaped pastry from ____'?

Austria's kipferl dates back to at least the 13th century. The buttery, flaky version came much later, when the French remade it with layered dough in place of brioche dough.

Which word fills the blank in the title of Salvador Dalí's painting of melting watches: 'The Persistence of ____'?

Memory's soft watches were inspired, Dalí said, not by the theory of relativity but by the sight of a Camembert cheese melting in the sun.

Which word fills the blank in the title of the first video ever uploaded to YouTube: 'Me at the ____'?

The zoo was San Diego's: in the 19-second clip, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim stands in front of two elephants and remarks on the length of their trunks.

Which word fills the blank: 'Australia's Great Barrier Reef lies off the Queensland coast in the ____ Sea'?

The Coral Sea holds the world's largest reef system, made up of over 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands strung along more than 2,300 kilometres.

Which animal fills the blank: 'Striped like a zebra, central Africa's ____ is the giraffe's closest living relative'?

The okapi and the giraffe are the only living members of their family. Science formally recognised the species only in 1901, after a skull revealed the kinship.

Which word fills the blank in the old proverb about people who never settle down: 'A rolling stone gathers no ____'?

Moss has been missing from rolling stones since about 1023, when the saying turns up in a Latin collection. Erasmus made it popular some 500 years later.