Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
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60 free Obscure trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 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 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which San Francisco resident declared himself 'Emperor of these United States' in 1859?
Joshua Norton
He issued his own currency, was humoured by local businesses, and about 10,000 people are said to have attended his funeral in 1880.
Q 02Which Roman emperor won the throne in AD 193 at an auction held by the Praetorian Guard?
Didius Julianus
He reigned for about nine weeks before the Senate condemned him and he was executed in his palace.
Q 03Kongō Gumi, described as the world's oldest documented company, was founded in AD 578 to build what?
Buddhist temples
It stayed under family control for roughly 1,400 years before becoming a subsidiary of Takamatsu Construction in 2006.
Q 04Sir Nils Olav, colonel-in-chief of the Norwegian King's Guard, is what kind of animal?
A penguin
He lives at Edinburgh Zoo and is inspected by the guard whenever it visits Scotland; the name has passed down through successive penguins since 1972.
Q 05The self-declared Principality of Sealand sits on what kind of structure in the North Sea?
A wartime sea fort
Roughs Tower was built in international waters during World War II and has been occupied by the Bates family since 1967.
Q 06Canada and Denmark's decades-long 'Whisky War' was a friendly dispute over which Arctic land?
Hans Island
Visiting officials from each side traditionally left a bottle of their national spirit and a flag; the two countries agreed to split the island in 2022.
Q 07Ernest Vincent Wright's 1939 novel Gadsby famously avoids which letter for 50,000 words?
E
A work that deliberately avoids a letter is called a lipogram; Wright said the hardest part was dodging '-ed' past tenses.
Q 08Pope Urban VII, whose 1590 papacy is the shortest ever, issued the first known public ban on what?
Tobacco
He threatened excommunication for anyone chewing, smoking or sniffing it in or near a church, and died of malaria 13 days after his election.
Q 09Shizo Kanakuri's 54-year 'slowest marathon' began when he vanished mid-race at which Olympics?
1912 Stockholm
Overcome by heat, he quietly went home to Japan without telling officials; Swedish television invited him back to cross the finish line in 1967.
Q 10The longest tennis match ever, at Wimbledon in 2010, ended with a fifth set of what score?
70–68
John Isner beat Nicolas Mahut after 11 hours and 5 minutes of play spread across three days.
Q 11Why was the last 'timeless' cricket Test, at Durban in 1939, abandoned as a draw after nine days?
England had to catch their ship home
Timeless Tests were meant to be played to a finish; 99 of them took place between 1877 and 1939 before the format was dropped.
Q 12Which company registered the world's first .com domain name, in March 1985?
Symbolics
The Massachusetts maker of Lisp machines is long gone, but symbolics.com was sold to a domain investor in 2009 and still resolves.
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
It is also the least populous state capital, with about 8,000 residents at the 2020 census.
Q 22Which US state was a de facto independent republic from 1777 to 1791, with its own coinage?
Vermont
Its founding delegates also forbade adult slavery, and its laws stayed in force when it joined the Union as the 14th state.
Q 23Which two countries are 'doubly landlocked', surrounded entirely by other landlocked nations?
Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan
One of the pair sits on the Rhine but has no boat access, because the river is not navigable that far upstream.
Engineer Neil Papworth typed it on a computer to a colleague at a Christmas party, since phones of the time could not yet send texts.
Q 14Long before email, the @ symbol was used in Spanish and Portuguese as the abbreviation of what?
A weight of about 25 pounds
The arroba took its name from the Arabic for 'the quarter'; Ray Tomlinson borrowed the symbol for email addresses in 1971.
Q 15The distress signal SOS was first adopted as a national radio standard by which country, in 1905?
Germany
The letters were chosen only because the Morse rhythm was easy to recognise; 'save our souls' was a backronym invented later.
Q 16Which country's anthem uses lyrics from a 9th-12th century poem, the oldest of any anthem?
Japan
Kimigayo's words come from an anonymous Heian-period waka poem; the tune itself was only composed in the 1880s.
Q 17Along with Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, which country's national anthem has no official lyrics?
Spain
The Marcha Real has had words written for it several times, including under Franco, but none was ever adopted by law.
Q 18Which country's national anthem is the only one still set to the melody of Britain's 'God Save the King'?
Liechtenstein
Oben am jungen Rhein was written in the 1850s, when the tune was also used by Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony and Switzerland.
Q 19The ngultrum is the currency of which country?
Bhutan
Its name means 'silver coin' in Dzongkha; the currency is pegged one-to-one to the Indian rupee.
Q 20Nukuʻalofa is the capital and largest city of which Pacific kingdom?
Tonga
It sits on the north coast of Tongatapu; Captain James Cook recorded anchoring there in June 1777.
Q 24Which country sits on the highest ground of Zealandia, an almost entirely submerged continental mass?
New Zealand
It broke away from Gondwana roughly 80 million years ago and may have been fully underwater by about 23 million years ago.
Q 25The oldest known Earthly material, 4.4-billion-year-old zircons, comes from the Jack Hills in which country?
Australia
The site is about 800 km north of Perth; graphite in one 4.1-billion-year-old zircon may even hold traces of early life.
Q 26Lake Hillier, famous for its bubble-gum pink water, lies on an island off which country?
Australia
It sits on Middle Island in the Recherche Archipelago and is separated from the ocean by only a narrow strip of dunes.
Q 27Which vertebrate has the longest known lifespan, estimated at anywhere from 272 to more than 500 years?
Greenland shark
It does not reach sexual maturity until around 150 and its pregnancies may last 8 to 18 years.
Q 28Which microscopic eight-legged animals have survived direct exposure to the vacuum of outer space?
Tardigrades
Also called water bears, they shrug off extreme heat, cold, pressure, radiation and years of dehydration.
Q 29The male platypus is one of very few venomous mammals. Where does it deliver its venom from?
Spurs on its hind feet
The animal also hunts with electrolocation, sensing prey with its eyes, ears and nostrils shut.
Q 30Frigatebirds can stay aloft for weeks over the ocean. How do they manage to sleep?
With one brain hemisphere at a time while airborne
Recorded mid-air sleep added up to less than an hour a night, usually while the birds were climbing on thermals.