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99 free Useless trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 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 99 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: accounts put the fighting at between 38 and 45 minutes.
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: one systemic heart circulates blood around the body, and two branchial hearts push it through the gills.
Q 04What is the name for the dot that sits above a lowercase i or j?
Tittle
Tittle: the small dot over a lowercase i or j. In English it appears only on those two letters, though dots sit over other letters in other languages.
Q 05Nintendo was founded in Kyoto in 1889 to produce what?
Handmade playing cards
Handmade playing cards: craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi's first product was hanafuda, the Japanese flower cards, and Nintendo went on producing them for more than a century.
Q 06Despite its name, how many years did the Hundred Years' War actually run?
116
116 years, since the conflict between England and France is conventionally dated 1337 to 1453.
Q 07In heraldry, the unicorn is the emblem of which country?
Scotland
Scotland: the unicorn is its national animal, and two unicorns supported the royal arms of the King of Scots before the 1603 Union of the Crowns.
Q 08Which 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 09Bubble wrap was created in 1957 when two inventors set out to make what?
Three-dimensional plastic wallpaper
Three-dimensional plastic wallpaper: Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes sealed two shower curtains together hoping to sell textured wallpaper, got a sheet of trapped air bubbles, and found no decorating market for it.
Q 10The first item ever sold on eBay was a broken example of what?
A laser pointer
A laser pointer: it sold for $14.83 in 1995, and when Pierre Omidyar checked that the buyer knew it was broken, the man replied that he collected broken laser pointers.
Q 11Google began in 1996 as a Stanford research project under what name?
BackRub
BackRub: Larry Page and Sergey Brin ran their search project under that name as Stanford PhD students before renaming it Google in 1997.
Q 12What sort of creature is Sir Nils Olav III, the knighted Norwegian military mascot living at Edinburgh Zoo?
A king penguin
A king penguin: Nils Olav has been mascot of the Norwegian King's Guard since its 1972 visit to the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, was knighted in 2008, and was promoted to major general in 2023.
Q 13A clay tablet sent to Ur around 1750 BC preserves a customer's complaint about a delivery of what?
Copper
Q 21In 897, Pope Stephen VI put whom on trial in Rome, propped up on a throne?
His dead predecessor's corpse
Formosus had been dead nine months; a deacon answered for him, he was found guilty and later thrown in the Tiber.
Q 22What fell from the sky over Bath County, Kentucky, for several minutes in March 1876?
Chunks of meat
Chunks of meat: theories range from vulture vomit to 'blood rain', and witnesses who tasted the flakes guessed beef, lamb, deer or bear.
Q 23Gary Dahl became a millionaire in 1975 selling what for just under $4 each?
Pet Rocks
Copper: a customer named Nanni accused the merchant Ea-nasir of delivering sub-standard copper ingots and treating his messenger with contempt; the tablet is about the size of a postcard.
Q 14The world's shortest scheduled flight, about 1.7 miles, links Westray and Papa Westray in which archipelago?
The Orkney Islands
The Orkney Islands: Westray and Papa Westray lie off the north coast of Scotland, and Loganair's hop between them is timetabled at about two minutes.
Q 15The longest place name in any English-speaking country, 85 letters, is a hill in which country?
New Zealand
New Zealand: the Maori name Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu belongs to a 305-metre hill in southern Hawke's Bay on the North Island.
Q 16In 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 17A 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 18A burst vat at a London brewery in 1814 released a flood of which drink into a slum, killing eight?
Porter
Porter: a giant vat of porter at Meux's Horse Shoe Brewery on Tottenham Court Road burst, and the inquest ruled the deaths 'casually, accidentally and by misfortune'.
Q 19What did Frau Troffea start doing in a Strasbourg street in July 1518 that dozens of others then joined?
Dancing
Dancing, for days; the city council hired musicians to let the afflicted dance it out, which made things worse. Ergot poisoning and mass hysteria are the leading explanations.
Q 20The 1859 'Pig War' over the San Juan Islands began when a farmer shot a pig eating his what?
Potatoes
Potatoes: Lyman Cutlar shot a Hudson's Bay Company pig rooting in his potato patch, offered $10, and its owner demanded $100. The pig was the conflict's only casualty.
Pet Rocks sold nearly 1.5 million in about six months, clearing 95 cents on each.
Q 24Andre Geim won a satirical Ig prize in 2000 for levitating a frog. What did he win in 2010?
A Nobel in physics
A Nobel in physics for graphene made Geim the only person to hold both an Ig Nobel and a Nobel.
Q 25'Boaty McBoatface' won a 2016 vote to name a polar ship. What was it actually called?
RRS Sir David Attenborough
RRS Sir David Attenborough got the name although Boaty took a third of the vote, ten times Attenborough's; Boaty went to a yellow submarine on board instead.
Q 26Stubbs, honorary mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska from 1997 to 2017, was what kind of animal?
A cat
A cat named Stubbs drew 30 to 40 tourists a day to Nagley's General Store, his 'mayoral office'.
Q 27According to Suetonius, the Roman emperor Caligula's horse Incitatus ate from a manger made of what?
Ivory
Ivory: Suetonius writes that Incitatus had an ivory manger, a marble stall and purple blankets. The claim that he was made consul is legend; Suetonius says only that Caligula planned it.
Q 28How did several German nobles die at a royal meeting in Erfurt in 1184?
Drowned in a cesspit
Drowned in a cesspit: the hall floor collapsed under the crowd, dropping nobles through the ground floor into the latrine pit beneath, where about 60 drowned.
Q 29The 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, wrote to the White House a month after Pearl Harbor; each bomb casing held more than a thousand bats carrying tiny timed incendiaries.
Q 30The CIA's 1960s 'Acoustic Kitty' project surgically fitted what into a cat?
A microphone and transmitter
A microphone and transmitter went into the cat in an hour-long operation; a former officer put the cost at about $20 million, and the first mission was to eavesdrop in a Washington park.