Wikipedia:Unusual articles

This page contains material that is kept because it is considered humorous.
Such material is not meant to be taken seriously.

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Articles about things considered unusual may be accepted in Wikipedia if they otherwise fulfill the criteria for inclusion. This page is not an article, and the only criterion for inclusion is consensus that an article fits on this page.

Lists of unusual things in Wikipedia mainspace (see Category:Lists of things considered unusual) should have an external reference for each entry that specifically classifies it as unusual, to avoid making it a point of view (POV) fork of original research. Still, all such lists risk being deleted for lack of a neutral definition of what counts as "unusual".

Of the over six million articles in the English Wikipedia there are some articles that Wikipedians have identified as being somewhat unusual. These articles are verifiable, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia, but are a bit odd, whimsical, or something one would not expect to find in Encyclopædia Britannica. We should take special care to meet the highest standards of an encyclopedia with these articles lest they make Wikipedia appear idiosyncratic. If you wish to add an article to this list, the article in question should preferably meet one or more of these criteria:

The article is something a reasonable person would not expect to find in a standard encyclopedia.
The subject is a highly unusual combination of concepts, such as cosmic latte, death from laughter, etc.
The subject is a clear anomaly—something that defies common sense, common expectations or common knowledge, such as Bir Tawil, Märket, Phineas Gage, Snow in Florida, etc.
The subject is well-documented for unexpected notoriety or an unplanned cult following at extreme levels, such as Ampelmännchen or All your base are belong to us.
The subject is a notorious hoax, such as the Sokal affair or Mary Toft.
The subject might be found amusing, though serious.
The subject is distinct amongst other similar ones.
The article is a list or collection of articles or subjects meeting the criteria above.

This definition is not precise or absolute; some articles could still be considered unusual even if they do not fit these guidelines.

Each entry on this list should be an article on its own (not merely a section in a less unusual article) and of decent quality, and in large meeting Wikipedia's manual of style. For unusual contributions that are of greater levity, see Wikipedia:Silly Things.

In this list, a star () indicates a featured article. A plus () indicates a good article.

Places and infrastructure

Breast-shaped hill	Laid bare in many places around the world. May have given their name to Manchester.
Eiffel Tower replicas and derivatives	Not as unique as you might have thought.
Folly	Buildings prized for their uselessness.
Gravity hill	A hill that gives the illusion of objects rolling up it.
List of cities claimed to be built on seven hills	Almost 100 different cities across all inhabited continents, trying to get the credibility of having something in common with Rome.
List of micronations	Ever wanted to start your own country?
List of tautological place names	Place names that contain truisms and say what they are.
Pizza farm	All the ingredients of pizza, grown in one convenient location!
Recursive islands and lakes	Islands in lakes in islands in lakes in islands...
Rocket garden	Landscaping and rocketry, together at last.
Spite house	Various houses built solely out of spite for their neighbors.
Valeriepieris circle	You either live inside the circle or outside. Even though you live inside.

Africa

	Akon City, Senegal	A 2000s R&B singer is planning his very own city in Senegal, based around his very own cryptocurrency which he calls "Akoin".
	Bir Tawil	One of the few places on Earth not claimed by any country. An American trekked there and claimed it in 2014 as the Kingdom of North Sudan so he could make his daughter a princess.
	Blue Desert	Following the Egypt–Israel peace treaty, the United Nations gave several tons of blue paint to a Belgian artist, so he could commemorate it by painting a line of boulders in the Sinai Desert blue.
	Boulders Beach	A beach on the Southern African coast, near an urban residential area, known for being home to a colony of several thousand penguins.
	Congo Pedicle	What happens when a tyrannical king decides he wants to hunt game in a swamp.
	Dallol (hydrothermal system)	A region surrounding a volcano in Ethiopia, known for its alien-looking bright colours, and populated by vast salt plains and extremely hot acidic sulfur-emitting hot springs, that according to some studies, are absent of even the smallest microbes. There is a now-abandoned town of the same name nearby, which formerly held the record of the hottest inhabited place on Earth.
	Gaet'ale Pond	A small lake in Ethiopia that was created in 2005 after an earthquake. It's not bitter, it's just really, really salty.
	Jacob's Ladder	It's all very downhill from here.
	Kalakuta Republic	A compound housing Fela Kuti - a famous Nigerian musician - his family, band musicians and recording studio, which he declared independent and used to criticize the Nigerian military junta of the 1970s. They responded by raiding it with over a thousand soldiers, setting it alight, and throwing Fela's mother out of the window.
	Lake Nyos	A lake in northwestern Cameroon that exploded in 1986, killing 1,746 people. One of 3 known exploding lakes, the others being Lake Monoun and Lake Kivu.
	Mauritania Railway	Mauritania's entire national rail network consists of a single line connecting the centre of the country's iron mining industry with the port city of Nouadhibou. Said line is also home to the world's longest and heaviest trains, filled with iron ore and as long as 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) in length.
	Oklo Mine	The former site of the world's only natural nuclear fission reactors.
	Palácio de Ferro	A bright yellow iron building in Luanda dating back to the colonial era, that is noted for the fact that there is no record of who or why it was built - although legend has it that it was designed by Gustave Eiffel, architect of the Eiffel Tower.
	Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera	A rock on the Moroccan coast connected to the mainland by an 80-metre-wide (260 ft) tombolo; it is owned by Spain. In 2012, four Moroccan irredentists attempted to storm and take over the territory.
	Republic of Benin (1967)	One of the shortest-lived states in history, it was independent for only seven hours (07:00 to 14:00 on 19 September 1967).
	Socotra	A Yemeni island that is geographically part of Africa, and is known as "the most alien-looking place on Earth" due to its strange fauna. This includes the "dragon blood tree" and a tree which produces cucumbers.
	La Tante DC10 Restaurant	A grounded McDonnell Douglas DC-10 passenger aircraft in Accra that has been converted into a giant plane-shaped restaurant.
	Tromelin Island	An island near Madagascar that is famous for being the site of a major humanitarian disaster in the 18th century.
	The Owl House	Not the acclaimed animated LGBT horror-comedy that aired on Disney Channel; this is an outdoor museum that was created by a reclusive outsider artist who decorated her inherited house with over 300 glass and concrete sculptures of owls, camels, peacocks, pyramids, and other forms.
	Umoja, Kenya	An entire women's-only village in Kenya established in response to violence against women in Samburu tribal society.

Antarctica

	Blood Falls	A naturally occurring plume of saltwater that is blood red thanks to its high iron oxide content.
	Mawson Peak	The tallest mountain in Australia is not on the mainland, but on a barren, uninhabited island more than 3,800 kilometres (2,400 mi) away.
	McMurdo Dry Valleys	An area of Antarctica that a) contains an extremely saline body of water, and b) has not experienced rainfall for over two million years.
	Marie Byrd Land	The largest unclaimed territory in the world. Notable for being bigger than Mongolia, having one of Antarctica's biggest human bases, and being the setting of The Thing.
	Pole of Inaccessibility research station	A short-lived Soviet research station in Antarctica that is now completely covered by snow - save for a small bust of Vladimir Lenin peeking out the ground.
	Troll Airfield	A real Norwegian airfield - not trolling

Asia

	798 Art Zone	How an abandoned complex of military factory buildings became the heart of Beijing's modern art scene.
	Artsvashen	An Armenian town surrounded and controlled by Azerbaijan. One of a number of similar towns on this border; others include Yukhari Askipara, Barxudarlı and Karki.
	Aoshima, Ehime	An island where cats outnumber humans 36:1. Weirdly not the only cat island in Japan (see: Tashirojima).
	Atar, Padang Ganting	An Indonesian village with a monument resembling a photocopier.
	Bust of Ferdinand Marcos	The former dictator of the Philippines comissioned a massive ugly-looking bust of himself to be carved into a mountain as a Mount Rushmore rip-off, displacing indigenous inhabitants. It was mercifully blown up by rebels in 2002.
	Camp Bonifas	The bunkers on this golf course feature machine-guns and landmines.
	Chao Mae Tuptim shrine	A shrine dedicated to penises in Bangkok, built in the early 20th century by a Thai businessman, on the edge of his property.
	Christmas Island	A small island and external territory of Australia close to Indonesia that is mainly known for having up to 100 million crabs migrate to spawn there every year.
	Dahala Khagrabari	India inside Bangladesh inside India inside Bangladesh. Formerly the only third-order enclave in the world.
	Darvaza gas crater	A flaming, 70 m (230 ft) wide, 30 m (98 ft) deep crater in the middle of the Karakum Desert, on fire since 1971.
	Dhekelia Power Station	A Cypriot power station that provides power to a British military base that surrounds it.
	Diomede Islands	Two islands in the Bering Strait separated by 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) and 21 hours' time difference.
	Gangkhar Puensum	The tallest mountain nobody has ever summitted, as the Bhutanese government has prohibited mountaineering since 2003.
	Gate Tower Building	A skyscraper in Japan that has a highway offramp passing through its fifth, sixth and seventh floors.
	Hallstatt (China)	An ongoing replica construction of a town in Austria.
	Haesindang Park	Also known as "Penis Park", this is a park on the Korean coast, known for being full of wooden statues of penises, apparently to do with local shamanic folklore.
	Hanazono Room	An indoor swimming pool in Japan used as the site for many pornographic films.
	Hằng Nga Guesthouse	Vietnam's most fantastical building?
	Imsil Cheese Theme Park	I dunno, this place seems a little cheesy to me.
	Jatinga	The Bermuda Triangle of birds.
	Jaxa (state)	A 17th-century microstate located on the Amur River between the Tsardom of Russia and Qing China, with a population mostly consisting of Polish and Ukrainians.
	Jewish Autonomous Oblast	In the depths of Eastern Siberia there's a place with street names in Yiddish, even though 99% of its population is not Jewish.
	Kabul synagogue	The last synagogue in Kabul was inhabited by two men, who both ended up being imprisoned by the Taliban because they got annoyed by the two constantly complaining about each other, before later being converted by one of the men into a kebab restaurant.
	Kai Tak Airport	A major international airport closed in 1998 where planes literally almost crashed constantly into the city due to a right-hand turn over the city.
	Karni Mata Temple	A marble temple famous for 25,000 revered black rats that live in the temple who are considered the ancestors of Charans.
	Kijong-dong Daeseong-dong	Two unique Korean villages, separated by the DMZ and notable for their arms race of giant flagpoles. The North Korean village contains a propaganda-blasting loudspeaker and zero residents to hear it. Meanwhile its Southern counterpart forbids residency except to families that have been there since before the War, and grows "DMZ rice" that makes the farmers exceptionally wealthy.
	Korea Central Zoo	A zoo with such wondrous animals as a chimpanzee with a smoking habit, a parrot that sings the praises of Kim Il-sung, and dogs.
	Kowloon Walled City	A former enclave in the city of Hong Kong, known for lawlessness and extremely cramped conditions before it was destroyed and turned into a park.
	Li's field	A supposed forcefield that explains why tropical cyclones swerve away from Hong Kong.
	Living root bridge	Double-decker suspension bridges formed of living plant aerial roots of rubber fig trees by tree shaping common in the southern part of the Northeast Indian state of Meghalaya.
	Love Land	An erotic-themed sculpture park on Jeju island in South Korea.
	Maijishan Grottoes	A massive complex of hundreds of man-made caves, stairways and thousands of Buddhist sculptures carved into the side of a mountain in the fifth century, high above the surface.
	Masuleh	A village built on the side of a mountain in such a way that most of the walkable space in the village is on the rooftops of the buildings of the layer below.
	Missing Post Office	Where all the world's undeliverable post goes.
	Nahwa	One of only eight counter-enclaves (enclaves of enclaves).
	Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic	A landlocked exclave of Azerbaijan (it is surrounded by three different countries rather than only one, so it is not an enclave).
	Nanjie	A settlement in Henan Province that is often described as "China's last Maoist village", maintaining a collectively-owned economy and public displays and statues of historic Marxist-Leninist leaders.
	National Fisheries Development Board building	Another example of memetic architecture, this time in Hyderabad, in a building that is shaped as a humongous fish.
	North Sentinel Island	A small island in the Bay of Bengal, known for being inhabited by a virtually uncontacted isolationist tribe who attack all outsiders who attempt to land on their island. The Indian government leaves them alone, outlawing all travel to the island - although that hasn't stopped some foolish travellers from trying.
	National Route 339	A national highway with a staircase in the middle.
	Neutrality Monument	A massive legged arch built in the capital of Turkmenistan by the eccentric former dictator to commemorate the fact that Turkmenistan is officially neutral. Also used to feature a gold-plated statue of him on top that constantly rotated so that it always faced the sun.
	Ōkunoshima	An island between the Japanese home islands of Honshu and Shikoku formerly home to a chemical weapons plant in WW2, now home to a huge population of feral but largely tame rabbits.
	Om Banna	An Indian shrine dedicated to a supposedly-sentient motorbike.
	Omsk Metro	A metro system with only one station and a total length of zero kilometres.
	Peanut Hole	A delightfully named patch of ocean in the Sea of Okhotsk that is totally surrounded by Russia's EEZ but not inside it. Often the subject of foreign overfishing.
	Porcelain Palace	China's largest and most lavish palace - that is dedicated to the humble public toilet.
	Rednaxela Terrace	A street in Hong Kong, whose name was reportedly reversed due to a clerical error.
	Robot Building	That's not a giant robot looming in Bangkok; it's just a bank's headquarters.
	Roopkund	A small lake in the Himalayas known for mysteriously having hundreds of ancient human skeletons along its edges.
	Ryugyong Hotel	Once, it would have been the world's tallest hotel – except it lacked windows, fittings, or fixtures for over twenty years.
—	San Serriffe	A lesser-known island in the Indian Ocean, subject of the April 1, 1977 Guardian.
	Sansha	A disputed prefecture-level city in Hainan consisting of a collection of atolls and reefs throughout the South China Sea.
	Kingdom of Sedang	In the 1880s, a French adventurer created a kingdom in Vietnam.
	Seikan Tunnel Tappi Shakō Line	The closed funicular that connects an underground train station inside the Seikan Tunnel with a museum.
	Shingō, Aomori	A town in Japan that is (supposedly) home to the tomb of Jesus. The story behind the supposed tomb is even odder.
	Sokh District	An exclave of Uzbekistan enclaved within Kyrgyzstan with a 99% Tajik population.
	Tashirojima	An island in Japan notable for being full of cats. Weirdly not the only cat island in Japan (see: Aoshima, Ehime).
	Thames Town	An entire replica English-style town built as an upscale planned community near Shanghai. Mostly empty, but a popular destination for wedding photography.
	Thimmamma Marrimanu	A single tree with a canopy that covers 19,107 m², and consequently is considered sacred among followers of several Indian religions.
	Tomb of Suleyman Shah	One of the burial sites of the first Ottoman emperor's grandfather is part of Turkey despite being 27 kilometres (17 mi) south of the country's border with Syria.
	Trunyan	A village in Bali where residents openly lay corpses on the ground and wait for them to decompose instead of cremating or burying them.
	Tsu Station	By kana, the tersest railway station in Japan, serving the capital of an almost as terse prefecture. By stroke count, the tersest in the world. By transliteration, only second-tersest.
	Underground City (Beijing)	A massive complex of tunnels underneath Beijing, built in the Cold War as a nuclear bomb shelter, fitted with facilities such as schools, clinics, factories and even an ice rink.
	Villaggio Mall	A Qatari shopping mall built to resemble an Italian town, with Venetian canals and gondolas. Also notorious for being the site of a deadly nursery fire in 2012.
	Wonderland Amusement Park	The largest abandoned amusement park in Asia.
	X-Seed 4000	The tallest building ever designed, standing 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) tall and housing 500,000 to 1,000,000 people on 800 floors. It is, however, "never meant to be built".
	Yongning Pagoda	A 6th-century pagoda that was possibly the tallest structure in the world until it was destroyed by lightning 18 years after its completion.
	Zhangye National Geopark	A national park known for its mountains with natural multicoloured stripes.
	Zheltuga Republic	An illegal gold mining settlement that developed into a thriving unrecognised country, only surviving because the Chinese government was unaware that it existed.

Europe

A chandelier, decorating the Sedlec Ossuary, made from human bones.

A mosaic of 4.6 million seashells. Who built it? When? For what purpose?

	Abode of Chaos	An artist buys an old scenic house in a rural town and transforms it into a replica warzone that serves as an open-air museum of radical avant-garde art, angering locals enough to sue him in France's supreme court.
	Ängelholm UFO memorial	A memorial to a reputed UFO landing in Sweden.
	Argleton	A non-existent town in Lancashire, England that appeared on Google Maps.
	Baarle-Hertog	Two municipalities, one of Belgium and one of the Netherlands, that surround each other twice and many times over. Some houses and shops are in both countries.
	Baarle-Nassau
	Barack Obama Plaza	A motorway service area in County Tipperary, Ireland celebrating the work and Irish heritage of U.S. President Barack Obama.
	Barcelona Supercomputing Center	A supercomputer in a medieval chapel.
	Barentsburg	A completely Russian town, inhabited by Russians, with Russian buildings, supported financially by the Russian government, located in Norway.
	Barra Airport	An airport that only operates when the tide allows.
	Battersea Power Station tube station	A train station named after a non-train station.
	Beans and Bacon mine	With such little ventilation, visitors may want to avoid any source of ignition. Nearby mines are not to be outdone and have the following names: Mule Spinner, Frogs Hole, Cackle Mackle, and Wanton Legs.
	Berlin Brandenburg Airport	A construction-finished but unfinished in other areas airport in Berlin. Construction was finished in 2012; however, the opening date was repeatedly pushed back as the fire suppression system was installed incorrectly. It finally opened in October 2020.
	Bielefeld conspiracy	The Bielefeld-Verschwörung tries to hide the horrible truth about a city in Westphalia, Germany that doesn't exist... well, maybe.
	Brennender Berg	A German coal mine on fire since 1668.
	The Broomway	Perhaps the most dangerous path in the world. Would you join the hundred others who died walking the invisible path?
	Brusio spiral viaduct	The title says it all, really.
	Bucket Lake	A lake that only exists thanks to the wanton misuse of a plastic bucket.
	Bunkers in Albania	Enver Hoxha loved them so much he decided to fill his country with over 173,000 of them.
	Büsingen am Hochrhein	A German town that is fully contained within Switzerland.
	Butt Hole Road	A tiny residential street in the UK that was so infamous for its name that it became a tourist attraction.
	Buzludzha monument	A futurist monument built by the Bulgarian Communist Party that looks like a communist spaceship - especially on the inside.
	Carpatho-Ukraine	The third-shortest-lived state in history (see Benin Republic in Nigeria); it was independent for only 24 hours.
	Cerne Abbas Giant	An indecent chalk man in the English countryside.
	Clachan Bridge	Walk across the Atlantic in just 30 seconds!
	Couto Misto	A de facto independent microstate on the border between Spain and Portugal that existed until the 19th century.
	Crinkley Bottom	An unsuccessful series of three theme parks built across England, devoted to a grotesque and horrifying BBC children's TV character from the 90s. One of them collapsed within four months of opening due to a massive and costly legal dispute with the local council over funding and liquor permits, while the abandoned site of another was demolished after it was used to host illegal raves.
	The Crooked House	A pub along the Staffordshire/Black Country border which was at an angle due to ground subsidence as a result of local mining activity, causing bottles rolled along tables to appear to roll uphill. It was destroyed in suspicious circumstances in August 2023.
	Crooked Forest	A grove of pine trees that are all bent in the same direction just as they emerge from the ground, before going straight back up again as normal. Nobody knows why this is the case.
	Dartmouth railway station	A train station that has been open since 1864 despite no trains ever stopping there.
	Eichener See	A lake in southern Germany that only occasionally contains water.
	Ferdinand Cheval	A postman, who, for thirty-three years, collected stones while making his rounds and used them to build a surreal Palais Idéal ("Ideal Palace") of astonishing proportions and intricate detail.
	Colletto Fava	A 1,500-metre (4,900 ft) hill with a 61-metre (200 ft) stuffed pink bunny on top.
	Ebenezer Place, Wick	The world's shortest street.
	Fallen Monument Park	A Russian park best known for its toppled statues.
	Ferdinandea Island	The island that disappeared. And rose again. And sank again. And rose again. And sank again.
	Flannan Isles Lighthouse	Located on Eilean Mór, this lighthouse to the west of Scotland is the subject of an enduring mystery over the disappearance of its keepers in 1900.
	Forest swastika	A gigantic swastika made of larch trees that went unnoticed for nearly sixty years.
	Fugging, Upper Austria	A village in Austria that used to be called "Fucking", but changed its profane-sounding name after years of torment in the form of stolen road signs (some of which had to be enstoned in concrete) to something that still sounds kind of profane.
	Galešnjak	An island off the coast of Croatia that is naturally shaped like a heart symbol.
	Gammalsvenskby	A Swedish village, populated by Swedes, who speak an ancient Swedish dialect, in Ukraine.
	Gropecunt Lane	A street name found in English towns and cities during the Middle Ages.
	Grūtas Park	Alternatively known as Stalin World, this park answers the little-asked question of "what should we do with all these Soviet-era statues and monuments from our oppressive past?" Won its creator, mushroom magnate Viliumas Malinauskas, the 2001 Ig Nobel Prize.
	Icelandic Phallological Museum	A museum in Iceland solely devoted to the collection of penis specimens and penis-related art.
	JASON reactor	The only nuclear reactor in a 17th-century building.
	Kielce Bus Station	A Polish bus station that was deliberately designed to look like a UFO.
	Kőbánya cellar system	Budapest has an expansive underground complex of beer and wine cellars that is so large it totals around 200,000 square metres (2,200,000 sq ft) in area.
	Krzywy Domek	The most interesting house in Poland.
	Kursdorf	A village that was abandoned after being gradually encircled after a nearby major aiport, resulting in an average sound level of nearly 60 decibels. It earned the title of "the loudest village in Germany".
	Leaning Tower of Suurhusen	Beating the world-famous Leaning Tower of Pisa by 1.22 degrees.
	List of destroyed landmarks in Spain	Over 60 interesting buildings, including larger castles, royal palaces, leaning towers, city gates which were completely or partially demolished and no longer exist, with their respective articles and images.
	Llandegley International Airport	When is an international airport not an international airport? When it's not an airport at all.
	Llanfairpwllgwyngyll	Or Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, if you want to get technical.
	Magic Roundabout	Only in the United Kingdom would you find a large roundabout with six mini-roundabouts. (Not to be confused with the "Magic Roundabout"s in Colchester, Swindon or High Wycombe – or, for that matter, this "Magic Roundabout".)
	Märket	A lighthouse built on this island led to a redefinition of the border between Sweden and Finland.
	Metro-2	A purported secret metro line in Moscow.
	Monte Kaolino	A ski resort without snow.
	Mount Athos	An autonomous polity in Greece home to 20 monasteries, notable for being the only political subdivision in the world in which women (as well as female animals) are prohibited from entering for any reason.
	Municipalities of Liechtenstein	The blotchy, angular borders between these divisions seem almost arbitrarily strange. The UAE's are similarly weird.
	Nelson's Pillar	Dublin used to have its own version of Nelson's Column, that ended up serving as a symbol of British imperialism up until the 1960s, when it was blown up by Irish republicans, leading to the creation of several celebratory folk songs.
	Neutral Moresnet	A tiny European region – approximately 1.4 square miles (3.6 km²) – that existed for a century as neutral territory between Germany and Belgium.
	Newhaven Marine railway station	A railway station that was technically open between 2006 and 2020, despite (a) no passenger trains serving the station during that time, (b) an inability to buy tickets to the station and (c) the station itself being demolished in 2017.
	Other World Kingdom	A micronation and BDSM resort whose ultimate goal is "absolute matriarchy" – for all men to be enslaved by women.
	Paradiskullen	A ski jumping hill with a landing area that goes under one of Sweden's busiest railroads.
	Pheasant Island	An uninhabited river island which switches sovereignty between France and Spain every six months.
	Pierre-sur-Haute military radio station	An unassuming military station in France became a cause célèbre after French Intelligence tried to threaten Wikipedia into deleting its article on it.
	Principality of Sealand	A micronation located 6 miles (9.7 km) off the coast of Suffolk, England whose population rarely exceeds ten.
	Reality Checkpoint	A lamppost with its own name.
	Röstigraben	The "Coarsely Grated Potato Ditch" in Switzerland, dividing Swiss-German and Swiss-French cuisine.
	Saatse Boot	A piece of Russian territory through which a 900-metre (3,000 ft) stretch of Estonian road passes. Although people are allowed to drive on the road without a permit or visa, it is prohibited to travel on foot, or to stop the vehicle for any reason.
	Schwerbelastungskörper	A piece of Nazi architecture in Berlin, built with the sole purpose of being heavy.
	Scottish Court in the Netherlands	A former Dutch NATO base called Camp Zeist was briefly ceded to Scotland to enable the trial of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombers.
	Sedlec Ossuary	A Christian chapel decorated by the bones of approximately 40,000 people.
	Sexi (Phoenician colony)	An ancient ruins, also known as Sex or Ex, with several Roman-era suburbs, including Pænis, Socordia and Villa Fatuus Maximus.
	Shell Grotto, Margate	A grotto with a mosaic of 4.6 million seashells, hidden underneath a backyard. Nobody knows who built it, when, or for what purpose.
	Shit Museum	Don't worry, it's actually a good museum. For looking at excrement.
	Shitterton	Its sign got stolen so often, they bought a 1.5 tonne stone with the town's name engraved in it. (Surprisingly, that rude name really does mean what you'd think.)
	Smallest House in Great Britain	Only 5.49 square metres (59.1 sq ft) in size, in North Wales.
	Sovereign Military Order of Malta	A sovereign state with no land? How is that possible?
	Spreuerhofstraße	The world's narrowest street.
	Svalbard Global Seed Vault	If a global famine occurs, you better hope you live in Svalbard.
	Uffington White Horse	A giant chalk figure that has to be hit with hammers regularly to maintain it.
	Unst Bus Shelter	The only of its kind on the island of Unst, Shetland. It is periodically refurnished and contains a sofa and TV.
	Vatican Railway	It consists of a 680-metre (2,230 ft) branch line and was constructed as a direct result of the Vatican's recognition as a country.
	Vennbahn	A disused railway in Belgium which separates five pieces of Germany from the rest of Germany.
	Veyshnoria	A nonexistent border country of Belarus invented for a Union State military exercise and adopted by the Internet. It's totally coincidental that the territory of this "enemy state" corresponds to the most Catholic, most anti-Lukashenko, and least Russian-speaking regions of Belarus, honest.
	Victor Noir	A young journalist killed by the cousin of the French Emperor, who subsequently became a symbol of resistance prior to the fall of the regime... who also got a statue of himself with a massive bulge in his crotch that subsequently became a fertility symbol, with the bulge becoming rusted due to having been fondled by so many members of the public.
	Weißwurstäquator	The "White Sausage Equator" in Germany.
	White's	London's oldest and most famous gentleman's club had several famous people as members, including King Charles III, Prince William, former prime minister David Cameron and so on. The club is pretty much top secret, so yes, the English illuminati definitely aren't lurking and drinking tea there. Also, no girls are allowed.
	Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma-Gate	And the best street name has to go to this street in York, England. Also said to be the shortest street in the city too!
	Wooden Spoons Museum	A museum with the largest collection of wooden spoons in the world, ranging from 3,500 to over 6,000. Ladles and 500 erasers can also be found!
	Željava Air Base	An abandoned air base, located on the border between Croatia and Bosnia, that's almost entirely underground.

Latin America and the Caribbean

	Americana, São Paulo	A town in Brazil founded by Confederate farmers and soldiers in the aftermath of the American Civil War.
	Cancún Underwater Museum	A place where works of art are kept several metres beneath sea level.
	Cherán	A Mexican town where the residents decided to abolish their own local government and police force in 2011 due to rampant corruption and ties to organized crime. They don't appear to have any regrets.
	Colonia Dignidad	A rural community in Chile that has a story that not even the most insane writer could think of.
	Darién Gap	This journey is impossible with the modes you have selected.
	Devil's Island	A notorious penal colony off the coast of French Guiana.
	Ernst Thälmann Island	An island off the coast of Cuba that was (sort of) ceded to East Germany and thus (sort of) remains part of East Germany, which doesn't exist anymore (sort of).
	Guarapari	A Brazilian town with beaches that are naturally radioactive.
	The Guianas	If you think about it, three extremely sparsely-populated South American nations that are culturally part of the Caribbean, with a population of Amerindians, Indians, Africans, Maroons, mixed-race Indo-Africans, Javanese, Chinese, Hmongs, Portuguese, Lebanese, Haitians, and Brazilians, is pretty weird.
	Fordlândia	The man himself was not without his abject failures in Brazil.
	Hacienda Nápoles	The luxurious estate of the deceased drug lord Pablo Escobar that may lead to an invasive hippopotamus population in Colombia.
	Isla Apipé	An Argentine island in the Paraná River surrounded by Paraguayan waters.
	Island of the Dolls	Located in Mexico City, this is an island full of broken and deteriorated dolls of various styles and colors, originally placed by the former owner of the island.
	John Lennon Park	A park with a statue of John Lennon, in a country that used to ban his music in the 60s as it was a Western bloc cultural import. Also noteworthy for the fact that his statue doesn't normally wear glasses, as the glasses on the statue keep getting removed or vandalized, although the park now has a security guard whose job is to hang around near the statue and give him a pair of glasses upon request.
	Lençóis Maranhenses National Park	Wait, deserts don't seasonally flood. They just don't. Or do they?
	Nazca Lines	A line museum, exhibited outdoors in southern Peru.
	El Ojo	An almost perfectly circular, constantly rotating island in the marshes of Argentina. Its name is Spanish for "The Eye".
	Parícutin	A volcano that suddenly erupted out of a farmer's cornfield.
	Pig Beach	A place where you can swim with pigs.
	Plymouth, Montserrat	A national capital with zero population, as it was abandoned due to a volcanic eruption.
	Río Rico, Tamaulipas	A city that was ceded by the United States to Mexico in 1977 due to an earlier diversion of the Rio Grande.
	Santa Cruz del Islote	A tiny artifical island off the coast of Colombia that is said to be the most crowded island on Earth, with its own school, restaurant and other amenities, but without any crime nor police.
	Spiral Island	An artificial island, now destroyed, built from thousands of empty floating plastic bottles.
	Y Wladfa	A group of settlements in Argentine Patagonia home to the largest Welsh-speaking population outside of the British Isles, and the location of the Patagonian Welsh dialect.
	Yungas Road	An incredibly deadly mountainside road in Bolivia, only 3 meters wide in places and with no guardrails.

North America

It's about reaching out, closing up the distance.

	11 foot 8+8 Bridge	The bridge that continues to slice the roof off trucks that have fallen victim to it.
	33 Thomas Street	A windowless skyscraper in New York and suspected NSA mass surveillance hub. Not suspicious at all.
	A Mountain	Also known as Sentinel Peak, this hill in Tucson, Arizona literally has a big letter "A" on it.
	Agloe, New York	A fictional town in New York. Originally a phantom settlement, created as a copyright trap for a mapmaker, that ended up developing into an actual landmark.
	Alcohol and Drug Abuse Lake	Supposedly named after the treatment center nearby.
	Aroma of Tacoma	"What an incredible smell you've discovered" could have been this Washington city's motto.
	Aquarius Reef Base	A real-live underwater laboratory.
	Badlands Guardian	A natural topographic feature in Alberta, Canada, which, when viewed from above, looks remarkably like a human wearing a Native American headdress and earbuds.
	Beatosu and Goblu	Two non-existent towns that appeared on Michigan's official highway map as a reference to the University of Michigan and its rival, Ohio State University.
	Bubblegum Alley	70 feet of alleyway with its walls covered in used chewing gum.
	Bubbly Creek	The branch of the Chicago River that was so contaminated with blood from the Stock Yards that it gained this appetizing moniker.
	Bullfrog County, Nevada	A former county in Nevada established around a mountain which was to become a radioactive waste disposal site. As of 2022, it is the only uninhabited county-equivalent to ever be created in the United States.
	Busta Rhymes Island	Otherwise unnamed island because it had "rope-swinging, blueberries, and ... stuff Busta would enjoy."
	Canusa Street	A road that's in both Canada and USA.
	Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine	A machine that offered rare drinks with nobody knowing who operated it. It was in operation from the 1990s to 2018, when it disappeared and a note was left saying: “Went for a walk”.
	Cat Girl Manor	A manor described as "the Playboy Mansion of the kitten play community".
	Centralia, Pennsylvania	A town that's been on fire since 1962.
	Clinton Road (New Jersey)	In addition to having the longest traffic light in the country, the road is also notorious for reported occurrences of paranormal activity.
	Colma, California	A town where the dead outnumber the living by 1000 to 1.
	Conch Republic	As a protest against the actions by the United States federal government, Key West in Florida seceded from and then declared war on the United States, surrendered one minute later and then applied for $1 billion in foreign aid.
	Corporation Trust Center	A small single-story building where over 285,000 companies, or over 15% of all companies in the United States, are legally based.
	Crush, Texas	A temporary "city" established as the site of an 1896 publicity stunt, a staged train wreck. The wreck unexpectedly caused two deaths and numerous injuries among spectators.
	Cuyahoga River	Environmentalism in the United States essentially started because a river in Cleveland kept on catching fire.
	Dave Thomas Circle	A six-way intersection in Northeast D.C. with a Wendy's restaurant located in the middle until 2021. The site of numerous traffic fatalities, it's currently being converted into a city park.
	Dixie Square Mall	A shopping mall that stood abandoned for over twice as long as it was in business until it was finally demolished in 2012. It was featured in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers and became a popular target for urban explorers.
	Dorset, Minnesota	A town that, on multiple occasions, has had a child as their "mayor".
	Dude Chilling Park	Originally a sign placed in a Vancouver park as a prank, now officially recognized public art.
	Fenelon Place Elevator	The shortest and steepest railroad in the world, (supposedly) located in a town of around 60,000 people.
	Florence Y'all Water Tower	A Northern Kentucky town's unique "welcome" sign.
	List of former counties, cities, and towns of Virginia	All the places that are no longer found in Virginia, such as Illinois County, and a few that never were (including Walton's Mountain).
	Gann Valley, South Dakota	The county seat of Buffalo County, South Dakota, despite nearby Fort Thompson having a population more than 120 times larger than Gann Valley.
	Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport	Consists entirely of a deeply rutted unmanned strip of soil/gravel and a windsock.
	Gum Wall	A brick wall in Seattle burdened by chewing gum. Cleaned in 2015, only to be turned into a memorial for Paris.
	Habitat 67	A futuristic residential complex built in the 1960s that resembles a mass of cuboids haphazardly balanced on top of each other.
	Hans Island	A deserted Arctic island fought over by Canada and the Kingdom of Denmark for decades. The 2022 settlement created a land border between a North American and a European country.
	Hawaii 2	A quaint island in Maine purchased by Cards Against Humanity in 2014.
	Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump	Life lesson: if you see hunters chasing buffalo off a cliff, don't stand at the bottom.
	Hess triangle	This used to be part of a bigger plot of land but a road destroyed it but the planners couldn't plan correctly so it left this piece of land.
	Horace Burgess's Treehouse	A tree house built by a minister who claimed to have received a vision from God.
	Interstate 180 (Wyoming)	An Interstate Highway that isn't really a freeway at all.
	Interstate 19	The only U.S. highway marked in metric units, a relic of a historical push for metrication.
	Island of California	The third-largest U.S. state was formerly an island – at least on paper.
	Jackass Flats	The aptly named test site for the world's first and only nuclear-powered rocket engines.
	Jerimoth Hill	The highest natural point in Rhode Island. For years, one of the toughest highpoints in the U.S. to scale, not because of its 812-foot (247 m) height, but because of an angry old man who lived nearby.
	Just Room Enough Island	This island is about one-thirteenth of an acre in size but that didn't stop the Sizeland family from building a house on it.
	Landsat Island	A lonesome island with a frankly humorous tale.
	List of gaps in Interstate Highways	Traffic-lighted intersections, drawbridges, and other oddities in the Interstate Highway System which violate the standards.
	List of Las Vegas casinos that never opened	What happened on the drawing board stayed on the drawing board.
	London Bridge	An over century year old authentic English bridge...that now resides in the middle of the desert.
	M-185 (Michigan highway)	The only state highway in the country that bans motor vehicles. It's also the only state highway to not have an accident until 2005.
	Mary Ellis grave	A grave that found itself in the middle of a movie theater parking lot.
	Memphis Pyramid	The tenth-largest pyramid in the world, located in Memphis, Tennessee, and home to a Bass Pro Shops megastore.
	Michigan left	Directions are more complicated in Michigan.
	Mickey pylon	A powerline pylon with a shape reminiscent of a certain fictional rodent.
	Mill Ends Park	The smallest park in the world – 452 in² (0.292 m²) – in Portland, Oregon.
	Mojave phone booth	A public phone booth that stood for several decades in the middle of a desert, miles away from any roads or other structures.
	Mollie's Nipple	The name of multiple places in Utah... including at least one butte.
	Monowi	A village in Nebraska with a population of one. Hi, Elsie!
	Mr. Trash Wheel	A trash interceptor with giant googly eyes that patrols the Baltimore Inner Harbor, consuming trash. Has its own Instagram page.
	Murder Kroger	A supermarket with a dark story.
	National Raisin Reserve	Created after World War II to control raisin prices. Run by the Raisin Administrative Committee, of course.
	Nettilling Lake	Located on Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada. It's the largest lake on an island and also contains the largest lake on an island on a lake on an island, which in turn contains the world's largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island.
	Nitt Witt Ridge	A house in California, built out of beer cans, abalone shells, car parts, and other garbage previously tossed out by local residents, is now a historic landmark.
	Northeast Greenland National Park	The world's largest national park consists of over a quarter of Greenland's total land area, is larger than 166 sovereign states, and has no permanent human population.
	Peter Camani	A (now retired) Canadian art teacher who built a massive complex of sculptures of screaming face on his property in his spare time, and converted his house into a castle with a turret of a screaming face.
	Point Roberts, Washington	When defining international boundaries, sometimes a straight line isn't the best solution.
	Polar Bear Holding Facility	A prison for polar bears.
	Prada Marfa, Texas	For your luxury shopping bug, a Prada store in the desert.
—	Pyramid mausoleums in North America	Arizona Governor George Hunt will hereafter be addressed as "Pharaoh George I".
	Rabbit Hash, Kentucky	A town whose mayors, since 1998, have all been dogs.
	Raising of Chicago	During the 1850s, the city was raised on jacks, building by building.
	Republic of Indian Stream	An area of land in northern New Hampshire that was an independent country from 1832 to 1835.
	Republic of Molossia	A 34-person micronation in Nevada which takes the meaning of the phrase "a man's home is his castle" to new extremes.
	Rock N Roll McDonald's	A rock 'n roll-themed McDonald's restaurant located in Chicago, famous for being the subject of a song by outsider musician Wesley Willis.
	Rough and Ready, California	A currently populated, unincorporated mining town in the United States that seceded from the Union in 1850, forming the "Great Republic of Rough and Ready". Secession was rescinded less than three months later when its citizens noticed that they could not celebrate U.S. independence.
	Santa Claus, Arizona	In Mohave County, visit an abandoned tourist trap deep in the desert where Santa Claus, of all people, allegedly resides!
	Sam Kee Building	Known as the world's narrowest commercial building.
	Slab City, California	A massive off-the-grid trailer park on a former military base in the Sonoran Desert, that became a large-scale alternative community of misfits and wanderers that has persisted for decades, complete with various displays of colourful experimental sculptures made from whatever the residents can get their hands on.
	S.N.P.J., Pennsylvania	A municipality consisting solely of a Slovenian fraternity's recreation center, established (in part) to get around liquor laws.
	State of Scott	Scott County in northern Tennessee seceded and formed its own state in opposition to Tennessee joining the Confederacy. It remained this way for over a century until it rejoined Tennessee in 1986.
	Statue of Lenin (Seattle)	How a statue of Lenin made its way from Czechoslovakia to Seattle's Fremont neighborhood.
	Texas State Highway 165	The only state highway in the country specifically designated to serve a cemetery...and nothing more. It's also the only state highway in the country to be partially closed every night.
	Track 61 (New York City)	A secret train platform located below the Waldorf Astoria New York designed for use by U.S. Presidents when they would visit the hotel.
	U Thant Island	An island in the East River with a surprisingly in-depth history for only being 2,000 square feet (190 m²) in area.
	U.S. Route 19 Truck (Pittsburgh)	A road in Pittsburgh that features a number of wrong way concurrencies, including one with itself.
	Truth or Consequences, New Mexico	A New Mexico town that chose to rename itself after the Truth or Consequences game show in 1950, then never bothered changing back.
	War of the Roses	The historical rivalry between Lancaster and York. Not to be confused with Wars of the Roses, the historical rivalry between Lancaster and York.
	Weather Station Kurt	That time when the Nazis landed in North America.
	Wedge	It's harder than you think to construct the state of Delaware with a ruler and compass.
	Whittier, Alaska	A city in Alaska where (almost) all of its residents live in one building: Begich Towers.
	Winchester Mystery House	A house believed to be haunted by the ghosts of individuals killed by Winchester rifles.
	World's littlest skyscraper	The result of a fraudulent investment scheme, it's a four-story brick building constructed in 1920 in downtown Wichita Falls, Texas that has only one room on each of its four floors.
	Zilwaukee, Michigan	"Is this Milwaukee?" "Uh...yeah, it sure is!"
	Zone of Death	The part of Yellowstone National Park in Idaho, where any crime can technically be committed without punishment – but don't tempt fate!

Oceania

	American Samoa	Despite having a functional legislature (the Fono) and a population of 46,366, American Samoa is considered an 'unincorporated unorganized' territory. It is also the only U.S. territory where people are not automatically born citizens, despite much of the population being involved in the military.
	Baldwin Street	A short suburban road in Dunedin, New Zealand, reputedly the world's steepest street.
	Ball's Pyramid	A nearly 600-metre-tall (2,000 ft) stone stack in the middle of the ocean.
	Banjawarn Station	Did a Japanese apocalypse cult test a nuke in the middle of rural Australia?
	Bayswater Subway	Bridge in Perth that has been hit by trucks 50 times between 2014 and 2020.
	Burning Mountain	A straightforwardly named mountain that has been on fire for over 6000 years.
	Cardrona Bra Fence	An eccentric tourist attraction in New Zealand.
	Coober Pedy	A mining town where most of the residents live underground.
	Concrete bus shelters in Canberra	These brutalist cylindrical bus shelters are an icon of Australia's capital city.
	Egmont National Park	This national park's boundaries created a circular forest.
	Horizontal Falls	This pair of Australian "waterfalls" appear to be falling straight across the land.
	Hunga Tonga	An island that was created in 2015 after a volcano erupted between two islands and connected them until another volcanic explosion in 2022 split them up again.
	Jellyfish Lake	A lake where jellyfish have evolved without stingers due to a lack of predators.
	Jervis Bay Territory	Briefly ceded to the ACT to give it access to the sea despite not bordering the ACT.
	Kalawao County, Hawaii	The second-least populous county in the United States (after Loving County, Texas), with a population of 90 as of the 2010 United States Census. Established as a leper colony in 1866, it occupies a peninsula on Molokai and is not connected by road to the rest of the island.
	Kingman Reef	It's designated as its own US overseas territory despite having an area of only 0.03 square kilometres (0.012 sq mi) and being almost entirely underwater during low tide.
	Macquarie Island	The only place on earth where rocks from the Earth's mantle get exposed to the surface.
	Montague Street Bridge	A bridge in Melbourne that has had so many trucks crash into it and get stuck under it, the government used millions of dollars to install prevention measures (it did nothing).
	Mount Wycheproof	Considered a mountain when only 43 metres (141 ft) above surrounding terrain and 143 metres (469 ft) above sea level. There are parts of Sydney which have a higher elevation and are not considered a mountain.
	Murray Valley Highway	A 671-kilometre (417 mi) road that has a road route number of B400 for 668 kilometres (415 mi) in the Victorian section and unmarked for 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) in the New South Wales section making the Victorian road network not connected to the New South Wales Network in that area.
	Nelson–Blenheim notional railway	A road that was officially considered to be a railway by the New Zealand Government for 22 years.
	New Zealand State Highway 78	A road in Timaru, New Zealand, that is designated a highway despite being only 900 metres (3,000 ft) long.
	Palmyra Atoll	The United States' only 'incorporated unorganized' territory, despite there being no government and virtually no permanent residents for the Constitution to apply to...
	Pitcairn Islands	A British Overseas Territory where the entire population is Seventh-day Adventist and descended from the mutineers from the HMS Bounty. The entire population moved to Norfolk Island for three years in the 1850s and is currently at risk of going extinct due to the high number of emigrants. Also the site of a scandal where 13 Pitcairn Islands men, almost a third of the islands' population, were convicted in a sex abuse scandal, giving the islands the highest rate of sex offenders in the world.
	Pink Lake	A lake that is naturally pink, but suddenly turned blue in 2010.
	Princes Freeway (east)	A freeway with houses, traffic lights, and a 60-kilometre-per-hour (37 mph) limit in some areas. What are VicRoads thinking?
	Sandy Island	An island which was shown on Google Maps satellite view until 2012 despite not existing.
	That Wanaka Tree	A tree named after a hashtag on Instagram.
	Taumata	With a full name consisting of 85 characters, this hill may be the longest place name in the world.
	Te Urewera	A forested area in New Zealand that is also a legal person (see below).
	Whanganui River	A river in New Zealand that is legally a person.
	Wedding Cake Rock	A rock that looks exactly like a wedding cake.
	Whangamōmona	A township in New Zealand that also happens to be a self-declared republic, whose past presidents include a goat and a poodle.

History

The infrastructural shortcomings of Faraday's times proved especially overpowering in the summer of 1858.

The wooden broomstick on which the Night Witches worked their magic.

Abul-Abbas	An Asian elephant given to Carolingian emperor Charlemagne by the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid.
Architecture terrible	An architectural style advocated by French architect Jacques-François Blondel.
Are There Men on the Moon?	An essay written by Winston Churchill in 1942 about the possibility of alien life.
Anti-tobacco movement in Nazi Germany	Somehow, Nazi Germany was a pioneer of policies of this kind.
Kinjirō Ashiwara	Emperor of Japan, but only in his own mind.
John Bentinck, 5th Duke of Portland	A reclusive English nobleman who built a vast maze under his home.
Eduard Bloch	The Jewish doctor that treated Hitler's mother and was the only Jew that was protected by the dictator himself when Nazi Germany invaded Austria.
Burned house horizon	The horizon which consumed cultures in the Balkans and around the Black Sea.
Burning of the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala	One of the most tragic episodes in the history of relations between the two countries.
Cadaver Synod	A deceased Pope was exhumed and put on trial!
Charles II of Spain	The last Habsburg King of Spain, who was so inbred that he could barely rule his nation.
Chewing gum sales ban in Singapore	The curious case of the banning of gumballs in an Asian nation.
COINTELPRO	The FBI's name for their undercover operation of investigation, and at times disruption, of influential groups and people in the inland United States during the Cold War. Some of the most famous individuals observed in this operation include: Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, John Lennon, Charles Chaplin and Malcolm X.
Confederados	A small group of white Brazilians with roots in the southern United States.
Cottage cheese boycott	A protest against rising staple food prices in Israel.
Count of St. Germain	The original Tommy Wiseau, an eighteenth century polymath who made a number of contradictory claims about his origins, including that he was 500 years old. People have also claimed he is an important theosophical figure who many have claimed to have met years after his supposed death in 1784.
Crocker Land Expedition	An expedition to a non-existent island created to swindle a businessman.
Curonian colonisation	A Latvian duchy's little-known colonial empire, consisting of bits of land along the Gambia River and the island of Tobago.
Czechoslovak Togo	A landlocked Eastern European country proposed getting a colony in Africa, to be administered by its troops in Siberia.
Dancing plague of 1518	In 1518 around 400 people took to dancing for days without rest, and, over the period of about one month, some of those affected died of heart attack, stroke, or exhaustion.
Daughter of Emperor Xiaoming of Northern Wei	A disputed first female monarch of Chinese history before Wu Zetian, whom the Empress Dowager Hu declared was a boy and was emperor for a day before being replaced by another infant.
Rudi Dekkers	How the September 11 attacks changed everything for the flying instructor of two of the hijackers.
Timothy Dexter	Genius businessman or loony?
Đorđe Martinović incident	One of the motives that contributed to the collapse of Yugoslavia. We are serious.
Defenestrations of Prague	When was the last time throwing someone out of a window started a war?
Dublin whiskey fire	In 1875, a whiskey brewery warehouse in Dublin caught fire leading to the deaths of 13 people - only none of the deaths were actually from the fire itself; rather, it was because the people responded by lapping up streams of undiluted whiskey running through the streets, killing them via alcohol poisoning.
Elagabalus	The number one Syrian teenage sun cultist polygamist possibly-transgender Roman emperor!
Erfurt latrine disaster	It's incredible how quickly someone's life can go to shit.
Johann Georg August Galletti	The early-19th-century master of the bizarre turn of phrase.
Juan Pujol García	A spy who worked as a double agent for the Nazis and the United Kingdom during World War II.
Glass delusion	Believing oneself to be made of glass was quite in vogue among Renaissance-era European nobility.
Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist	Thieves stole 3,000 tons of it! Is it really that valuable?
Great Michigan Pizza Funeral	"Ashes to ashes, crust to crust."
Great Molasses Flood	A storage tank burst and flooded the streets of Boston with a 25-foot (7.6 m) high wave of molasses.
Great Moon Hoax	An infamous article by The Sun that claimed that animals such as unicorns and bat-winged humans were found living on the moon.
Uday Hussein	Saddam Hussein's oldest son and a real-life Far Cry or James Bond villain. Among other things, he was a rapist and murderer, had a doppelganger named Latif Yahia, (whom Uday would send to torture) and also had the habit of kidnapping women at wedding celebrations.
Great Stink	A London summer so smelly it prompted government action.
Charles J. Guiteau	The strangest man to ever assassinate a US President. Highlight: the self-penned poem from the point of view of a child that he wrote for his execution.
History of Liberia	Probably the most interesting history that many historians don't study.
Violet Jessop	An Argentinian nurse known for surviving three separate maritime disasters, including the sinkings of both the Titanic and the Britannic.
Kilroy Was Here	A meme from World War II.
Knights of the Golden Circle	A secret society of American slave masters that planned to invade lands in Latin America to spread their pro-slavery views.
Kottabos	The world's first drinking game. Care to play? All you need is a bronze "lamp stand" with a tiny statuette on top and some wine.
Bobby Leach	Went over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survived, attempted to swim the rapids under it and survived... then died after slipping on an orange peel.
London Beer Flood	Nine people drowned by a flood of over 300,000 gallons of beer.
Louis Antoine, Duke of Angoulême	King of France for 20 minutes.
Loveday	Can holding hands and going to church end a civil war? Turns out: no.
Gregor MacGregor	That's his real name. Possibly the only honest thing about him.
Máel Brigte of Moray	A Pictish nobleman who somehow managed to bite a man to death despite being long-dead himself.
Makassan contact with Australia	Over a century before Europeans made contact with Australia, Makassarese people from Sulawesi seeking sea cucumbers traded with the Aboriginal Australians of Kimberley and Arnhem land, bringing Islamic and Indonesian influence to the local culture, art, language, and lifestyle.
Wilmer McLean	His house was damaged in the First Battle of Bull Run, the first major engagement of the American Civil War, so he moved to get away from the fighting... to the house where General Lee would surrender. It can be said that the war both started and ended in his front yard.
The Miracle of 1511	When the people of Brussels protested against their rulers by building satirical and pornographic snowmen.
MKUltra	The CIA's dabblings in brainwashing, sensory deprivation and LSD experiments.
Moscow gold	At the start of the Spanish Civil War, more than 70% of the Bank of Spain's gold reserves were transported to the Soviet Union by the Republican government. The controversy and mystery of where it went continues to echo through Spain.
Mutiny on the Bounty	The true story starting with a stern captain and a lustful crew on a Royal Navy ship and ending with the British-Polynesian Seventh-day Adventist culture of the Pitcairn Islands. Plenty of drama in-between.
Night Witches	An all-women Soviet bomber regiment who, despite flying in wooden training planes (or perhaps because of it), were highly successful and contained 23 different Heroes of the Soviet Union.
Nika riots	Kind of like football hooliganism, except for chariot racing, and also if it resulted in tens of thousands dead, half of Constantinople being burnt to the ground and the Emperor nearly being lynched.
Nongqawuse	During (and likely because of) colonization, a Xhosa teenager became an apocalyptic prophetess, ordering the Xhosa to destroy their own crops and livestock - which they did.
North Hollywood shootout	In 1997, two heavily armed men were involved in a bank robbery, which turned into a 44-minute shootout with police officers. 20 people were injured as a result, and only the criminals died.
Norwegian butter crisis	A massive inflation of butter prices caused illegal smuggling and an "emergency appeal" from a Danish television show.
John P. O'Neill	As special agent in the FBI, he'd investigated Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden but quit due to internal politics. He then took up a job in the World Trade Center. In 2001. (Quote from his friend on hearing he'd taken that job: "At least they're not going to bomb it again".)
Onfim	A 7 year-old medieval Russian boy whose homework tablets, complete with doodles of himself as a "wild beast", were preserved for 700 years before being excavated and becoming a primary source for life in the Novgorod Republic.
Operation Red Dog	A group of American and Canadian white supremacists plot to independently filibuster a small Caribbean nation. A plan straight from the mid-1800s: foiled in 1981.
Order of the Pug	A fraternal order that existed for Roman Catholics in Bavaria in the 18th century.
Emilio Palma	An Argentine national who was the first person to be born in Antarctica.
Assassination of Olof Palme	The murder of a Swedish prime minister that became one of the country's most durable mysteries.
Pepsi fruit juice flood	A PepsiCo warehouse collapse flooded the streets of Russia with an assortment of juices.
Phantom time conspiracy theory	What if I tell you that almost 300 years of history were fabricated?
George Psalmanazar	A Frenchman who was so successful in convincing 18th-century Britain he was a Taiwanese man, that he wrote an elaborate and blatantly fictitious history of the island.
Pope Benedict IX	He became pope at twenty, and later sold the papacy. He was pope three times.
Pre-Columbian transoceanic contact theories	Everything from standard theories of contact across the Bering Strait, to more "fanciful" claims - like that the Native Americans are one of the lost tribes of Israel, or that the Zuni people are related to Japanese peasants.
Punjabi Mexican Americans	When confronted by anti-interracial marriage laws in 1910s California, Punjabi and Mexican immigrants intermarried as both were considered "brown", creating a unique, dynamic community and a delectable new fusion cuisine.
Puyi	He became the last Emperor of China at the age of two and died as an ordinary citizen, ending 2,133 years of dynastic rule in China. In his twilight years, he also did community theater.
Cyril Radcliffe, 1st Viscount Radcliffe	The Englishman that drew the current borders between India and Pakistan. Radcliffe not only never set foot on the subcontinent, but was also given a limit of five weeks to complete his task. The consequences of the implementation of this action were, among many things, one of the biggest humanitarian crises in history, several deaths, and a major impact on the national identities of both India and Pakistan. See also Radcliffe Line.
Rangoon bombing	A relatively unknown case of North Korean violence aimed at South Korean representatives in Burma.
Ratlines (World War II)	The underground secret lines for fleeing Nazis after World War II.
Reggio revolt	That time the Italian Christian Democrats, Communist Party and Socialist Party collectively faced down an armed regional uprising supported by the Cantabrian branch of the Christian Democrats, the Democratic Socialist Party, the Italian Anarchist Federation and neo-fascists, all because they picked the wrong city as the regional capital.
Mathias Rust	The West German who landed on a bridge in Moscow in 1987.
Sacred Band of Thebes	An elite fighting force consisting of a hand-picked groups of 150 pairs of male lovers.
Crown Prince Sado	To prevent him from becoming the new monarch of Joseon Korea, his father, the king, locked him in a rice chest for eight days, killing him through dehydration.
Khalid Sheldrake	The story of an English pickle merchant who became a devout Muslim and was declared king by Uyghur rebels during the Chinese Warlord Era.
Heinrich Schliemann	A pioneer of archaeology, but not for good reasons.
Shindo Renmei	A group of Japanese extremists in Brazil who attacked other members of the Japanese community in the country after the latter admitted that the motherland had been defeated following World War II.
Sino-Roman relations	These empires inched progressively closer to each other in the course of the Roman expansion into the ancient Near East and of the simultaneous Han Chinese military incursions into Central Asia. Mutual awareness remained low, and firm knowledge about each other was limited.
Shi Yousan	Early 20th-century Chinese general who seemingly made it his life mission to betray everyone he met.
Otto Skorzeny	A Nazi official whose biography reads like a 007 thriller novel. He first became famous for leading an operation to rescue Mussolini, then somehow managed to escape the post-war trials only to find himself working at the Middle East for people like Gamal Nasser and Yasser Arafat. He also apparently worked for Argentinian president Juan Perón and, near the end of his life, agents of Israel's intelligence service Mossad supposedly hired him as a hit man. Skorzeny died in 1975 in Spain, having never denounced the ideology of Nazi Germany.
Satanic Verses controversy	How the launch of a historical fiction novel not only changed the life of its author but also caused the deaths of many people and worsened relations between the English-speaking world and the Islamic world.
Tanganyika laughter epidemic	Not so funny.
Tuskegee Syphilis Study	One of the darkest and most bizarre biological experiments in US history, one which spanned decades.
Uday Hussein	Saddam Hussein's oldest son and a real-life Far Cry or James Bond villain. Among other things, he was a rapist and murderer, had a doppelganger named Latif Yahia, (whom Uday would send to torture) and also had the habit of kidnapping women at wedding celebrations.
Roman von Ungern-Sternberg	During the Russian Civil War, an ultra-reactionary Baltic German general converted to Buddhism and tried to revive the Mongol Empire.
United States involvement in regime change	Now, this is perhaps the most complicated and long article in this list. However, you'll find many surprises once you read it. See also Operation Condor.
William Walker (filibuster)	A lawyer, doctor, and avid pro-slavery filibuster from the US who tried to conquer the northern part of Baja California, where he failed, and then was able to conquer the newly independent Nicaragua where he ended up as the de facto president for almost a year. He was ultimately expelled from the country and killed in Honduras, but his history contributed to the concept of Latin America.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi	Survived both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings in 1945.
John Zegrus	A man who showed up in Japan in 1959 under a fake identity, claiming to be a war hero who was now working as an ambassador and spy from the fictional African nation of Negus Habes based in South Korea, looking to recruit Japanese soldiers to fight for the United Arab Republic. This implausible backstory has inspired a number of urban legends. His true identity and purpose for his visit remain unknown.

Mathematics and numbers

Is this identical to one?

"BEGhIL0S", "hELL0", "B00BLESS", etc. – there are many words that can be spelled on a calculator.

−0	Zero has a negative flavor in the worlds of computing, experimental science and statistical mechanics.
0.999...	An infinitely long way to write 1.
2 + 2 = 5	...or perhaps it equals 1984...
616 (number)	The real number of the beast?
65537-gon	This many-sided polygon can be constructed with a compass and straight edge... but then again, so can a circle, and it's not like you'd notice the 15 parts per billion of difference.
All horses are the same color	Flawed mathematical induction proof that all horses are the same color.
Almost everywhere	Does not refer to advertising or corrupt corporate practices, but is instead a term in measure theory.
Almost integer	By a strange coincidence, $e^{\pi }-\pi \approx 20$ - and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Belphegor's prime	1 followed by 13 zeros followed by 666 followed by 13 zeros followed by 1.
Bertrand's postulate	Despite now being a theorem, still conventionally called a postulate.
Calculator spelling	5318008!
The Complexity of Songs	A treatise on the computational complexity of songs by venerable computer scientist Donald Knuth.
Cox–Zucker machine	This machine does what?!
Erdős–Bacon number	A combination of the degrees of separation from actor Kevin Bacon and mathematician Paul Erdős.
Extravagant number	Don't take it shopping. Not very friendly with the frugal number either.
Gabriel's horn	A geometric figure with an infinite surface area but finite volume. So even if the horn was filled with paint, you could never paint its surface.
Graham's number	A number so large that the observable universe is not big enough to write it in full in decimal notation or even scientific notation.
Hairy ball theorem	Seriously... Couldn't you come up with a better name?!
Happy number	Not just a cheery song on the radio.
Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel	A fully occupied hotel cannot accommodate any more guests. Or can it? Or, once it can, can it not?
Illegal number	Does the US government forbid knowledge of the existence of certain numbers?
Illumination Problem	A room with a bit of a shadow.
Indiana Pi Bill	A notorious attempt to legislate the value of pi as 3.2.
Infinite monkey theorem	An infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters will (almost surely) produce all possible written texts.
Interesting number paradox	Either all natural numbers are interesting or else none of them are.
Legendre's constant	After 91 years and much effort, this legendary constant was found to be ... 1. Just 1.
Look-and-say sequence	Also known as the Cuckoo's Egg.
Mathematical fallacy	Trying to prove that 2 = 1 or that 1 < 0.
Mathematical joke	Complex numbers are all fun and games until someone loses an i. That's when things get real.
Minkowski's question-mark function	A function with an unusual notation and possessing unusual fractal properties.
Monty Hall problem	The counter-intuitive way to prevail when playing Let's Make a Deal.
Moving sofa problem	What is the largest area of a sofa that can be manoeuvred through an L-shaped corner?
Narcissistic number	The pluperfect digital invariant says "Count me in"!
Nothing-up-my-sleeve number	A number which is "above suspicion".
Number of the beast	For beastly people bored of the number of unluckiness.
Numbers station	[Six bars of The Lincolnshire Poacher play] "¡Atención! ¡Atención! One, four, seventeen, twenty-four..."
Pi is 3	Did Japanese education guidelines shockingly redefine pi as exactly 3? No, they didn't, but where's the news story and public outcry in that?
Potato paradox	If potatoes consisting of 99% water dry so that they are 98% water, they lose 50% of their weight.
Ramanujan summation	What do you get when you add all positive integers, up to infinity? You get a negative fraction.
Schizophrenic number	Can numbers have mental disorders?
Sexy prime	Prime numbers that differ from each other by sex. Er... six.
Six nines in pi	A mathematical coincidence, the sequence "999999" appears a mere 762 digits into the decimal expansion of pi.
Spaghetti sort	An algorithm for sorting rods of spaghetti.
Taxicab number	Never tell a Numberphile that a number is uninteresting.
Tetraphobia	Sometimes found in conjunction with triskaidekaphobia (see below) in East Asian cultures. More prevalent in Japan, where 49 is associated with "suffering until death".
Titanic prime	Surprisingly, not discovered by Leonardo DiCaprio.
Tits group	The perfect sporadic group doesn't exi-
Triskaidekaphobia	No, it's not related to the Code of Hammurabi. No, it's not always considered unlucky. Yes, space exploration has been touched by it.
Tupper's self-referential formula	A formula that draws itself!
Ulam spiral	A bored mathematician discovers an unusual numerical pattern while doodling.
Umbral calculus	A mathematical method successfully used for over 100 years, despite the notable limitation of no one on Earth knowing exactly how or why it worked.
Unexpected hanging paradox	If you're told you'll be hanged on a day you'll never expect it, you can prove logically that there's no day you can be hanged at all. Which, of course, means you won't expect it when the hanging does happen as planned.
Vacuous truth	All pigs with wings speak Chinese.
Vampire number	Integers with real bite; some even have multiple pairs of fangs.
Will Rogers phenomenon	When moving an element from one set to another set raises – counter-intuitively – the average values of both sets. Also known as the Will Rogers paradox.
Zenzizenzizenzic	You know how x³ is called "x cubed"? Well, x⁸ is called...
Zeroth	An ordinal number popular in computing and related cultures.

Dates and timekeeping

Abolition of time zones	No more asking "So what time is it there?"
Ruth Belville	She followed her parents in the business of selling people Greenwich Mean Time.
Chrismukkah	A fictional Christmas-Hanukkah hybrid, popularized by the television show The O.C..
Festivus	December 23: Holiday celebrated by the Costanza family on the television show Seinfeld, since appropriated by many.
International Talk Like a Pirate Day	Shiver my timbers (a-harrr!) every September 19.
List of non-standard dates	Including, among other things, January 0, February 30, and May 35.
Manhattanhenge	Twice every year, the setting sun aligns with Manhattan's street grid.
Mole Day	The Avogadro constant is celebrated on October 23rd starting at exactly 6:02 am.
Phantom time hypothesis	A theory by Heribert Illig that the Early Middle Ages (614–911) never occurred. Therefore, it is now 1726 rather than 2023.
Pi Day	The day – March 14 – on which the constant π is celebrated.
Pocky & Pretz Day	A day in Japan celebrating long, thin biscuits. Due to their shape, it is celebrated on 11/11.
Singles' Day	One is the loneliest number. 11/11 makes an appropriate date to celebrate being single.
Square Root Day	Any date when the day and month are both the square root of the last two digits of the year (the next being 5th May 2025).
Star Wars Day	May the 4th be with you.
Steak and Blowjob Day Cake and Cunnilingus Day	Male alternative to Valentine's Day and female response to that day.
Swatch Internet Time	In 1998, Swatch tried to reshape our timing system.
Thanksgivukkah	A Thanksgiving-Hanukkah hybrid when the two overlap in November in the US; maybe your Hanukkah present can be a Thanksgiving Dinner.
Towel Day	Don't forget to bring a towel, terrible or otherwise.
Undecimber	In Java, the thirteenth month of the year.
Winterval	A word created as an alternative name for all the holidays at the end of a calendar year. It came to prominence after Birmingham City Council (the English city) used it in 1998.
Year 2000 problem	A possible computing problem in the 1990's that was supposed to have occurred when the 21st century and 3rd millennium arrived. Of course, that never happened.
Year 2038 problem	The computing problem that will arise due to the Unix time representation used in many computers.
Year zero	Was there a year between 1 BC and AD 1?

Language

"Which këÿs för this heävy plästic müsïc?"

The Voynich manuscript is written in an undeciphered script.

-ussy	Yes, it means what you think it does.
2002 renaming of Turkmen months and days of week	For almost six years, the months and days of the week in the Turkmen language had their names changed at the order of Turkmenistan's despotic President for Life.
Académie de la Carpette anglaise	A satirical French organisation that awards prizes to "members of the French élite who distinguish themselves by relentlessly promoting the domination of the English language over the French language in France and in European institutions".
Antiqua–Fraktur dispute	A dispute over which typeface was more "German". At first, the Nazis were for Fraktur...
Apples and oranges	According to scholars, comparing the two may be easier than previously thought.
Belarusian Arabic alphabet	Turns out, a Slavic-based language can also be written in the Arabic script.
A Book from the Sky	A must-see for connoisseurs of gibberish.
Bouba/kiki effect	You instinctively know exactly which is which, no matter what language you speak.
Broome Pearling Lugger Pidgin	A pidgin formed in 20th century Western Australia from Aboriginal Australian English, Japanese, and Kupang Malay to facilitate communication between the variety of groups working on pearling boats in the Kimberley region.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo	A meaningful, grammatical construction that has inspired linguists to talk about bullying amongst Western New York's bison population.
The Chaos	The poem that mocks English spelling and pronunciation. Try to read it out loud!
Chinese characters of Empress Wu	Ever needed to be taken seriously so hard that you invented completely new characters and forced people to use them?
Chinese word for "crisis"	More notable among Americans than among the Chinese, apparently.
Codex Seraphinianus	A made-up enigmatic text released in 1981.
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously	A sentence contrived by Noam Chomsky to demonstrate that a sentence can be grammatical yet nonsensical.
Comparative illusion	More people have researched these nonsensical sentences than I have. [sic]
Controversies about the word niggardly	How a simple word can cause so much controversy.
Crazy English	"Li Yang's unconventional method of teaching English includes screaming popular and random English phrases at a rapid pace and occasionally, involves hand movements in patterns that reflect the word's pronunciation."
Cryptophasia	The secret language of identical twins, also called idioglossia.
Dipstick	The name of this measuring device can also mean idiot.
Disambiguation (disambiguation)	Sometimes people do dumb things.
Dord	A nonexistent English word, supposedly meaning "density", which was listed in the second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary from 1935 to 1939.
The Dozens	A usually good-natured African American ritual in which two competitors, usually male, exchange trash-talk until one has no comeback.
Duck test	A humorous abductive reasoning test based on the activities of a duck.
English as She Is Spoke	A 19th century Portugese-English phrasebook that became legendary for its overtly literal and inaccurate translations.
Engrish	Attempts by East Asian people – especially the Japanese – to construct English words and phrases.
Eskimo words for snow	The claim that Eskimo languages have an unusually large number of words for "snow".
Etaoin shrdlu	Cryptic echoes from the days of hot metal typesetting.
Faggin–Nazzi alphabet	What? That's its real name. What did you think it was about?
Faux Cyrillic	Give text some of that Яussiaи flavour.
Fictitious entry	The content may be fictitious, but the entry is a fact.
Fnord	Deliberately misleading, irrelevant or false information meant to suggest conspiracy. A popular word among Discordians.
Garden-path sentence	A sentence that doesn't seem gramatically correct, but that's because it tricks you into thinking the verb isn't where it is. It's very easy to catch yourself doing double takes when reading this article.
Ghoti	As good an argument as any for English-language spelling reform.
Hopi time controversy	A long-lived academic debate about the concept of time in the Hopi language.
How now brown cow	A way to greet those well-versed in rhetoric.
Hyphen War	A dash between communism and independence.
Ingressive sound	In many languages and dialects around the world, a loud inhalation means "yes".
Inherently funny word	Some influential comedians have long regarded certain words in the English language as humorous because of their sound or resemblance to other words. Poodle, wankel, ni...
Intentionally blank page	The self-refuting meta-reference that is "This page intentionally left blank".
Irony punctuation	Is your irony too subtle?
Irreversible binomial	Or, why it's fish and chips and not chips and fish.
James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher	Repetition gone wrong.
Latin profanity	Latin for the profane.
Law of holes	If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging!
La plume de ma tante (phrase)	One of the first phrases stereotypicaly learned in French, and one of the least likely to ever actually be used.
Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den	A 92-character poem written in Classical Chinese, in which every syllable has the sound "shi" (in different tones) when read in modern Mandarin Chinese.
List of common false etymologies of English words	Believe it or not, "crap" did not originate from Thomas Crapper.
List of English words containing Q not followed by U	A Scrabbler's dream article.
List of English words without rhymes	Does anything rhyme with orange? Or silver?
List of ethnic slurs	Ever wondered why they got so angry at you?
List of proposed etymologies of OK	There's more than you think, OK?
List of shorthand systems	Featuring Gregg, Pitman, and other quickly-written but only-theoretically-readable scripts.
Longest word in English	Floccinaucinihilipilification, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and other contenders.
Mamihlapinatapai	The Guinness World Record holder for the "most succinct word".
Martian language	Chinese language + Internet = new language.
Maternal insult	What is this article about? Your mom!
May you live in interesting times	The worst curse you can put on someone. Probably not Chinese in origin.
Metal umlaut	Gïvë thë lögö för ÿöür hëävÿ mëtäl bänd ä töügh Gërmänïc fëël.
My postillion has been struck by lightning	A perfectly normal thing to say, as recommended by 19th century multilingual phrasebooks.
Nucular	Enough people have mispronounced nuclear that it's apparently a real word now.
Phaistos Disc	Ancient spirals of undeciphered hieroglyphs.
Placeholder name	You know, thingamajigs, doohickeys, whatchamacallits...
Pompatus	All Steve Miller's fault.
Pronunciation of GIF	Remember when the internet spent most of 2014 arguing about this? Good times.
RAS syndrome	...which is itself an example of RAS.
Response to sneezing	Achoo! A great fortunate occurrence!
Robert Shields	You think you are hooked on recording every detail of your life...?
Rohonc Codex	A mysterious book found in Hungary that to this day remains unsolved.
Scientific wild-ass guess	Please excuse my SWAG.
Scots Wikipedia	What happens when an American man writes 23,000 articles in a language he has no idea how to speak?
Shibboleth	A type of slang used to identify an individual with a very specific region, usually with accompanied value judgments. Also, a funny word.
Shit happens	A statement of philosophical existentialism boiled down to two words.
Shm-reduplication	Ah, Wikipedia-shmikipedia.
Spelling of Shakespeare's name	What is the correct spelling of the famous English playwright?
Taito	A kanji with 84 strokes, the most for any CJK character by some distance.
Talk to the hand	...'cause the face ain't listening.
That that is is that that is not is not is that it it is	Punctuation matters, people.
The Moon is made of green cheese	Is it really made out of cheese?
There is no sex in the USSR	Did you know that?
Thinking about the immortality of the crab	A colorful Spanish idiom for daydreaming; try using this one if your teacher notices you becoming inattentive in class.
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana	Another example of syntactic ambiguity.
Toynbee tiles	Tiles found embedded in asphalt, usually sporting cryptic messages.
Tsundoku	Buy a book and then don't read it.
Unknown unknowns	Things that we don't know we don't know, as immortalised by Donald Rumsfeld.
Voynich manuscript	An undeciphered illustrated book written six hundred or so years ago by an anonymous author using an unidentified alphabet.
Wine-dark sea	Homer's epithet that raises a theory that Greeks of Homer's time were color blind.
Yan tan tethera	The proper, Brythonic way to count sheep oop North.
Zhemao hoaxes	An editor on Chinese Wikipedia created over 200 articles about fake Russian history, making it one of the largest hoaxes on Wikipedia.
Zzxjoanw	A fictional word that really confused linguists.

Specific languages, dialects, and pidgins

Abercraf English	How an all-new variety of English has developed in a single Welsh village since World War II.
Algonquian–Basque pidgin	A language formed in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence between native Algonquian peoples and the Basque whalers who they traded with.
Anāl language	Its phonemic inventory, sadly, doesn't include the voiced anal fricative.
Andalusian language movement	A group of people have attempted to promote Andalusian Spanish as a distinct language. They have successfully created an Andalusian version of Minecraft.
Antarctic English	Not spoken by penguins.
Arcaicam Esperantom	How do you make things look "old" in a constructed language? By inventing a new one!
Basque–Icelandic pidgin	Apparently Basque whalers got around to all sorts of places.
Boontling	Bet it seems pretty crazeek to harp boont to a kimmie Brightlighter like you, huh?
DoggoLingo	Hoomanz wrote thiz cool article about mai language!
Dravido-Korean languages	A discarded and mostly-forgotten hypothesis that Korean and the Dravidian languages of Southern India made up a single language family, despite being thousands of kilometres apart and sharing very little common history.
E-Prime	A form of English without the verb 'to be'.
High Tider	Some people in rural coastal areas of North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland still speak a dialect derived from the English spoken over 300 years ago.
Ithkuil	Try learning this in a weekend!
Jamaican Maroon Spirit Possession Language	A creole language with Akan vocabulary that is spoken by Jamaican Maroons in rituals involving spiritual possession.
Kebabnorsk	The delicious-sounding ethnolect prevalent in multi-ethnic Oslo.
Mediterranean Lingua Franca	The original lingua franca. Spoken from the 11th to the 19th centuries with substratum from Venetian, Genoese, Catalan, Occitan, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Arabic, Berber, Greek, Sicilian, Galician, and many more.
Nicaraguan Sign Language	In the 1980s, Nicaragua's first ever school for the deaf was opened, but rather than teaching them a sign language, the teachers tried teaching them to lip-read Spanish. This failed, and instead the children developed their own sign language from scratch, much to the interest of the world's linguists.
Pandanus language	Elaborate avoidance languages used by peoples of the New Guinea Highlands while foraging for screwpine nuts due to the belief that normal speech carries phrases and words that are unhealthy and will stunt the growth of the nuts.
Pirahã language	One of the simplest languages in the world, spoken by the Amazonian Pirahã people, and an example of a language that can be whistled. The subject of controversial claims that it proves the theory of linguistic relativity.
Plains Indian Sign Language	Despite (mostly) not being deaf, the various indigenous peoples of the North American Plains developed a sign language to use as their common form of communication with each other, rather than a lingua franca or creole language.
Proto-Human language	The (completely hypothetical) genetic ancestor to all the world's languages.
Russenorsk	A Slavic-Scandinavian pidgin that lasted only 150 years.
Silbo Gomero	The inhabitants of La Gomera of the Canary Islands communicate across valleys by whistling in Spanish.
Solresol	A constructed language based around musical notes.
Sḵwx̱wú7mesh	The native name of the indigenous Squamish language of British Columbia, which uses the number 7 as a letter.
Toki Pona	The opposite of the previously mentioned Ithkuil. Inspired by minimalism and Taoist philosophy, this constructed language has only 137 regularly used words.
Ubykh language	A language formerly spoken until 1992 by the Ubykh tribe of Circassians. The record-holder for most consonants of any non-click language, with 84 phonemic consonants, yet only 2 distinct vowels.
Wenzhounese	And you thought Mandarin was hard? A Chinese dialect nicknamed "the devil's language" for its extreme divergence and difficulty.
ǃXóõ	A click language with 122 consonants spoken by groups of San people in Namibia and Botswana.
Yerkish	An artificial language developed for use by non-human primates.

Unusual names

See Nominative determinism for the idea that people gravitate toward careers that fit their names, e.g. urologists named Splat and Weedon.

Amandagamani Abhaya of Anuradhapura	A king of Anuradhapura whose name has way too many As for me to be comfortable with.
Arses of Persia	Unfortunately, 4th century BC Persian rulers were unable to predict modern profanity.
Dick Assman	What? He was a celebrity for four months!
Harry Baals	Mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana in the 1950s and had a really unfortunate name. Almost immortalized in the Harry Baals Government Center, but it ended up being named Citizens Square instead.
C. H. D. Buys Ballot	No evidence of electoral fraud by the chairman of a precursor to the World Meteorological Organization.
Praise-God Barebone	Christened Unless-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barebone; not to be confused with his son Nicholas If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barbon.
Bishop Bishop (disambiguation)	There have been four different bishops named Bishop in England.
Dick Bong	The most successful American fighter pilot's LEGAL name was Richard, but he only ever went by the name "Dick Bong".
Cesar Chavez	Formerly Scott Fistler, this right-wing, pro-business politician changed his name to match the Hispanic left‑wing labor activist in an attempt to get more votes.
Thursday October Christian I	The son of Fletcher Christian, leader of the mutiny on the Bounty.
Deportivo Wanka	An unfortunately named Peruvian football team whose strips are remarkably popular in Britain.
Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft	An officials' association in pre-war Vienna, Austria, of a shipping company for transporting passengers and cargo on the Danube.
Preserved Fish	A historical New York City shipping merchant.
FM-2030	A transhumanist philosopher changed his name to this, inspired by his predictions for the year 2030.
Public Universal Friend	An 18th century Quaker who died, and was then revived, becoming an evangelist, gaining this unusual name, and becoming one of the earliest instances in recorded history of a person identifying as genderless.
Gregor Fučka	A Slovenian-born Italian basketball player with another socially problematic last name.
Guy Standing	Observed sitting in the infobox photo.
John le Fucker	His surname probably didn't mean what you think it might mean.
Argel Fucks	A Brazilian footballer with a socially problematic last name. An unforgettable newspaper headline once declared "Fucks Off to Benfica".
Jakob Fugger	One of the richest men in history, with a quite unfortunate surname.
States Rights Gist	A Confederate general during the American Civil War.
John B. Goodenough	Being good enough, this guy invented random access memory and the lithium-ion battery.
Curtis Hidden Page	An American writer whose middle and last names accidentally predicted the Internet, and the countless pages on it that could only be accessed by typing their URLs in the URL bar manually.
Ima Hogg	American society leader, philanthropist, patron and collector of the arts, and one of the most respected women in Texas during the 20th century.
Huang Hong-cheng	A performance artist that took advantage of the Taiwanese Name Act and named himself Huang Hong-cheng, Ah Cheng from Taiwan, World’s Greatest Man, God of Wealth, and President.
Tiny Kox	A Dutch politician.
Jennifer 8. Lee	A former New York Times reporter whose middle name is the number eight. And you thought Harry S. Truman had an exceptional middle name...
List of examples of Stigler's law	Bode didn't discover Bode's Law, and Pascal didn't discover Pascal's Triangle.
List of people with reduplicated names	…such as Boutros Boutros-Ghali and (see below) Neville Neville.
Henry Lizardlover	Yes, he appreciates reptiles.
Seán Dublin Bay Rockall Loftus	An Irish politician who changed his name to emphasize political affiliations.
Mannanafnanefnd	A committee in Iceland that determines whether a name is suitable for integration into the Icelandic language. Apparently voted yes about themselves.
Adolf Lu Hitler Marak	This Indian politician does not dispraise his parents' questionable name choice.
Mister Mxyzptlk	Sometimes called Mxy, a fictional impish character who appears in DC Comics' Superman comic books.
Names of Soviet origin	In the wake of the Russian Revolution, there was a craze for parents giving names of overtly revolutionary or Soviet inspiration. Examples include "Vladlen" (short for Vladimir Lenin), "Revmir" ("Revolution of the world", "Elmira" (electrification of the world), "Barrikad" (barricade) and "Geliy" (helium).
Naming law in Sweden	An odd Swedish law regulating children's names, which has led to disgruntled parents submitting names such as Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116, A (both pronounced "Albin"), and Metallica.
Neville Neville	The father of English footballers Phil Neville and Gary Neville.
Metta World Peace	An NBA player who wants to promote World Peace and has a reputation for on-court brawls.
Pro-Life	A perennial political candidate with strongly held views.
Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz	And that's the short title of this German beef labelling law.
Tokyo Sexwale	Despite not being Japanese or a sperm whale, he has control over the global diamond industry.
Sjokz	Commentator with an equally unpronounceable real name (Eefje Depoortere). Watch out! Eep!
Mansfield Smith-Cumming	The first head of MI6, whose name became appropriate as he promoted the use of semen as invisible ink.
M. K. Stalin	What if old Joe was Tamil?
Téa	This name is surprisingly French and not English.
Richard Plantagenet Campbell Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, 3rd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos	A warning to us all about taking double-barrelled surnames too far...
Leone Sextus Tollemache	Or Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraudatifilius Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache to his friends.
Tonibler	A name given in Kosovo in honor of a certain British politician.
Turnipseed	Only the most hardcore turnip farmers have this name!
Hubert Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Sr.	Longest name ever given. Note: the page title is only the short form.
Marijuana Pepsi Vandyck	Educational professional who earned her Ph.D. with a dissertation on uncommon Black names in the classroom.

Science

Archaeoacoustics	Can ancient pottery be used to play back recorded voices from the distant past?
Ota Benga	The tragic story of a Pygmy man from the Belgian Congo who was briefly exhibited in the Bronx Zoo.
Buttered toast phenomenon	But only if you're eating at a table.
Buttered cat paradox	If a cat always lands on its feet and toast always lands buttered-side-down, what if...?
Campanology	For the good of society, we must study how to properly ring bells.
Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre	SI rules says you can't use a capital letter for a unit unless it's named after a person, but everyone uses L for the litre... so they made up a namesake.
Cneoridium dumosum (Nuttall) Hooker F. Collected March 26, 1960, at an Elevation of about 1450 Meters on Cerro Quemazón, 15 Miles South of Bahía de Los Angeles, Baja California, México, Apparently for a Southeastward Range Extension of Some 140 Miles	This scientific paper has the longest article name on Wikipedia. The paper itself only has five words, though.
Vladimir Demikhov	Eminent Soviet biologist and father of the canine head transplant.
Drake's Plate of Brass	A forgery-related practical joke that went horribly awry.
Elvis taxon	A taxon (species, genus, family, etc.) that is extinct but is later imitated by others.
Further research is needed	Some journals have banned this infuriating and redundant cliché. Some researchers are researching its effects, but FRIN...
Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory	You may have had a chemistry set when you were a child. I bet it didn't come with radioactive substances in the box.
Greeble	Stimuli used in studies of object and face recognition with hilarious names.
Lazarus taxon	Leaping Lazarus! Somewhat like Monty Python's Dead Parrot, it's not really dead; it's just resting.
List of Ig Nobel Prize winners	Nobel Prize meets Weird Science. Result: Award-winning papers like "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts" and "Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans".
Nylon-eating bacteria and creationism	The intersection of science and religion in a simple bacterium.
'Pataphysics	A parody of science that purports to study what lies beyond the realm of metaphysics.
Archaeological interest of Pedra da Gávea	Did ancient Phoenicians visit Brazil centuries before the Portuguese? Actually, no, they did not.
Pathological science	A pejorative term for scientific ideas that will simply not "go away", long after they are given up on as wrong by the majority of scientists in the field.
Project Steve	A wildly successful list of scientists in which all signatories (1) support evolution, (2) oppose intelligent design, and (3) are named Steve or a variation of that name (Steven, Stephan, Stephanie, etc.).
Raven paradox	First, you'll grant that all ravens are black, yes...?
Sokal affair	Physicist Alan Sokal demonstrates that at least some postmodernists can't see an emperor with no clothes.
Timeline of the far future	The ultimate list of spoilers. Also gives you an existential crisis.
Women-are-wonderful effect	A phenomenon found in psychological and sociological research which suggests that people associate more positive attributes with the general social category of women compared to men.

Physics

"It's Professor Pauli! Quick, pack that stuff away!"

Anatoli Bugorski	What happens when you stick your head in a particle accelerator?
Colors of noise	Including white, pink, purple, blue...
David Hahn	A 17-year-old, known as the Radioactive Boy Scout, who irradiated his back yard attempting to build a nuclear breeder reactor from spare parts.
Demon core	A two-time radioactive killer.
Deutsche Physik	Or "German physics" during the Third Reich.
Fictional elements, materials, isotopes and subatomic particles	Not actual periodic elements. Many end in '-ite'. Some of the elements may indeed be minerals.
Fourth, fifth, and sixth derivatives of position	Named after a famous cereal phenomenon.
Flying ice cube	They happen to live inside the computers of scientists trying to simulate molecules.
Frog battery	A curious experiment to determine the existence of animal electricity.
The Hum	A phenomenon involving a persistent and invasive low-frequency noise of a humming character and unknown origin, not audible to all people, reported in various geographical locations.
Impossible color	Try to see it!
Kundt's tube	A serious piece of scientific apparatus whose name has induced sniggering among English-speaking schoolchildren for over 150 years.
List of unusual units of measurement	Fortnights and nibbles, super feet and Sagans.
Mpemba effect	Hot water freezes faster than cool water, and no one is sure why. Also probably the only scientific term named after a Tanzanian schoolboy.
Oh-My-God particle	Proof that physicists have a dramatic flair.
Pauli effect	Something in the lab not working? Technical difficulties? Blame this guy.
Quantum suicide and immortality	An infinite number of parallel universes means that any one person will always live forever.
Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube	What happens when you blow in a hole in a tube? Hot air comes out one end and cold air comes out the other. No consensus reached on why it happens yet.
Shower-curtain effect	Nobody knows why when you turn on the hot water in the shower, the curtain blows in.
Smoot	A strange unit of distance used to measure the Harvard Bridge.
Sound of fingernails scraping chalkboard	Urrrgggh!
F. D. C. Willard	A published author in the field of cryogenics, and a cat.

Earth sciences

"No, this definitely isn't flat, but it's the other way!"

Aachenosaurus	A fossil plant that was mistakenly identified as a dinosaur.
Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition	An ill-fated attempt to reach the North Pole in 1897.
Bloop	Does a mystery sound from the bottom of the sea indicate that Cthulhu may awake...?
Floyd Collins	A cave explorer from the early 20th century that got stuck in a cave in Kentucky. Despite a massive rescue effort, he ended up dying there, but that wasn't the end of his story.
Continental drip	A playful theory devised to explain why the continents are tapered toward the south.
Expanding Earth	A theory that the Earth is growing.
Hector (cloud)	A cumulonimbus thundercloud cluster that forms regularly nearly every afternoon on the Tiwi Islands in the Northern Territory of Australia, from approximately September to March each year. Also known as "Hector the Convector."
Snow in Florida	Yes, snow is not unknown in the "Sunshine State".
Kentucky meat shower	It's raining meat. Hallelujah it's raining meat.
List of unexplained sounds	Must've been the wind.
Mumbai "sweet" seawater incident	Salty creek becomes sweet for one tide cycle.
Rain of animals	When it's literally raining cats and dogs.
Red rain in Kerala	Did blood rain from the sky?
South-up map orientation	The crew of Apollo 17 snapped Earth with Antarctica on top. NASA followed Ptolemy and rotated it "back".
Roy Sullivan	An unlucky park ranger who was hit by lightning on seven separate occasions. He survived them all, but came to his own tragic end.
Tinnunculite	A recently discovered mineral that forms from bird feces.
Waffle House Index	The U.S. government's alternative measure of disaster impact.

Chemistry and material science

9,10-Dithioanthracene	The molecule that walks.
Botulinum toxin	One of the most deadly substances known is nonetheless extremely common in the cosmetic industry.
26th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union	Largest gem diamond ever found in Russia.
Cummingtonite	A hard rock.
Dihydrogen monoxide	A commonly used chemical that can be deadly to all forms of plant and animal life, contributing to global warming, erosion, acid rain, torture and countless other maladies. Or... that's what they want you to think.
Elephant's Foot (Chernobyl)	One of the world's most toxic objects, created as a product of the Chernobyl disaster.
List of chemical compounds with unusual names	Some a consequence of their constituents or origins, others simply the work of whimsical chemists.
Thomas Midgley Jr.	Inventor of two of the world's most severe pollutants – and a machine that killed him.
NanoPutian	A series of organic molecules having a structure that looks human.
New car smell	Ahh, that new car smell. What do you mean, it might be toxic?
Nitrogen triiodide	What's purple and explodes if a feather brushes it?
Pitch drop experiment	The world's most viscous liquid dripping out of a funnel since 1927. There's been 9 drops so far.
Proton-enhanced nuclear induction spectroscopy	A nuclear magnetic resonance technique with a very long name, so we can just call it penis.
Pykrete	A bullet-resistant frozen-water compound once used in an attempt to create an aircraft carrier.
Thiotimoline	A fictional chemical which dissolves before it comes into contact with water.
Trimethylaminuria	Do you smell something fishy? It may be you!
Unobtainium	A term used to describe any material with properties that are unlikely or impossible for any real material to possess.

Space and astronomy

"Of course, it never reached the Moon..."

1561 celestial phenomenon over Nuremberg	Perhaps one of the first "alien" sightings in recorded history.
Apollo 15 postal covers incident	Three astronauts never flew to space again after being paid to take postal covers with them on Apollo 15. But that's not much of a punishment though, considering they got to go to the freakin' Moon.
Blue Origin v. United States & Space Exploration Technologies Corp.	Two companies got into a brat fight and sued NASA in the process.
Cosmic latte	The average colour of the Universe: a slightly beige white.
Cydonia (Mars)	You've heard of the man on the Moon, now get ready for the "Face on Mars", well, sort of...
Edward Makuka Nkoloso	The leader of a non-government Zambian space program planned to send "Afronauts" to Mars with the goal of establishing a Christian ministry to civilise Martians.
Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster	Driving in space becomes reality.
Embryo space colonization	A proposal for colonizing space using embryos raised by robots.
Extraterrestrial real estate	Want to buy a housing plot on the Moon?
Fallen Astronaut	A small statuette which is the only sculpture on the Moon.
Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, and Phooey	Five mice who circled the Moon 75 times on Apollo 17, among the last eight Earthlings to travel to the Moon. Upon returning to Earth, the four remaining living mice were soon murdered and dissected in the name of science. ("That's one small squeak...")
Gauss's Pythagorean right triangle proposal	Proposal of Pythagorean theorem "drawing" to be constructed in the Siberian tundra as a signal for extraterrestrials.
Harlan J. Smith Telescope	Have you heard about the telescope that got shot? Contrary to initial reports, the harm from the bullets was extraordinary small.
Hot, dust-obscured galaxy	Hot DOGs, anyone?
Jovian–Plutonian gravitational effect	Sadly, the alignment of two planets wouldn't allow the British public to float. Maybe the fact that the news came out on April 1 should have clued them in.
List of hypothetical Solar System objects	The planets that could have been. You think Pluto had it rough? At least it got its fifteen minutes of astronomical fame.
Lunarcrete	Perfect for building your own cut-price Moon base.
Mariner 3	A Mars mission that failed after the spacecraft housing failed to open following launch. It was unable to deploy its solar panels and ran out of power. It is still orbiting the Sun.
Mars Climate Orbiter	Another failed Mars mission that disintegrated in the Martian atmosphere due to a unit conversion error.
Matrioshka brain	Star-sized computer.
Milkdromeda	The birth of a future galaxy, and the death of our own.
Mimas (moon)	A moon that looks like the Death Star.
The Moon is made of green cheese	Scientific consensus says it isn't, but are there people (or wolves) who think so?
Moon landing conspiracy theories	Fake photos, slow-motion cameras and secret studios. All directed by Stanley Kubrick.
Moon Museum	Only two people have ever seen its exhibits in person.
Nazi UFOs	Did the Luftwaffe, in fact, explore the final frontier and make contact with alien races? Whether the secret Nazi base is on the Moon or in Antarctica, the truth is apparently out there.
Nuclear pasta	Gnocchi, spaghetti, lasagna, bucatini and Swiss cheese may sound tasty at first, until you realized that one teaspoon of this pasta weighs more than Mount Everest...
Peryton (astronomy)	Don't use microwaves next to radio telescopes!
Seatbelt basalt	A lunar sample spotted by David Scott while driving the Lunar Roving Vehicle on the moon. He assumed that mission control wouldn't allow him to stop and get it, so he pretended he was fastening his seatbelt.
Phobos 1	Yet another failed Mars mission, this time due to a poorly-designed user interface causing an end-of-mission command to be accidentally transmitted to the spacecraft, permanently cutting off the power.
Sex in space	And when you've exhausted the list, here's something new to try!
Space advertising	Plans to launch giant billboards into space.
Space elevator competitions	How high can you go?
Spaghettification	What happens when you fall into a black hole.
Stolen and missing Moon rocks	The rocks were out of this world! Unfortunately, they fell into the wrong hands.
Solway Firth Spaceman	"Wasn't there when I took the pic – honest!"
Space Poop Challenge	A challenge in 2016 to design a new toilet system for use in space.
Sylacauga (meteorite)	The first fallen meteorite in recorded history to have verifiably injured a human.
Tabby's Star	A star that has been suggested to have an alien megastructure surrounding it.
Timekeeping on Mars	How Martians know when they are.
Vatican Observatory	One of the few official scientific institutions linked with the Catholic Church.
Voyager Golden Record	A compilation of sounds and images of humanity on a phonograph record made of gold-plated copper. It was sent to space in 1977 and is currently the farthest man-made object from Earth.
274301 Wikipedia	A comet named after Wikipedia. We truly came to the stars.
Wow! signal	Alien radio transmission, or, at least, the strongest candidate for that role.
Writing in space	How do you write in space?
iPTF14hls	A star that seems to have exploded 6 times in the past 70 years.

Medicine and health

Accessory breast	Some people have more than two.
Alien hand syndrome	An unusual neurological disorder, also known as "Dr. Strangelove syndrome", whereby one of the sufferer's hands seems to take on a life of its own.
Anal wink	Here's looking at you!
Auto-brewery syndrome	Like a microbrewery in your digestive system.
Banana equivalent dose	A banana for scale.
Black hairy tongue	Really?
Bristol stool scale	Taking a close look at a toilet bowl for the sake of science. The scale was inspired by eye charts.
ChIA-PET	Chromatin Interaction Analysis by Paired-End Tag sequencing, that is.
Chronic Lyme disease	A conspiracy theory about long-lasting effects of Lyme disease, not to be confused with actual latent symptoms of lyme disease
Coffee enema	A bizarre type of alternative medicine.
Danger triangle of the face	A very specific area of your face where bursting a boil could mean certain death.
Dimples of Venus	For fans of those dimples you don't find on a face.
Dr. Young's Ideal Rectal Dilators	Forcibly withdrawn after officials clamped down on them.
Eigengrau	The color seen by the eye in perfect darkness.
Fart lighting	The act of igniting gases produced by human flatulence.
Five-second rule	The notion that food dropped on the floor is safe to eat only as long as it's picked up within five seconds.
Gynecomastia	Also known as "man boobs" or "moobs".
Hair-grooming syncope	Who knew that brushing your hair could be deadly?
Human–animal breastfeeding	If you have breast milk to spare, a puppy, piglet or monkey would like to hear from you.
Hypertrichosis	Also known as "Human Werewolf Syndrome".
Hypoalgesic effect of swearing	Got hurt? Swear the pain away!
Jenkem	Huffing the gas from fermented human feces for a hallucinating effect.
Lucky iron fish	Treat anemia by putting an iron fish in your soup.
Maggot therapy	Those hungry, wriggling little larvae will clean up festering wounds because they are hungry.
Male lactation	Given the right conditions, just about any male can do it.
Maple syrup urine disease	For once, a sweet smell you don't want your infants exuding.
Medical students' disease	A condition frequently reported in medical students who perceive themselves to be experiencing the symptoms of the diseases they are studying.
Mellified man	A legendary medicinal substance from Arabia involving honey.
Moebius syndrome	A disease, most envied by poker players, that makes facial expressions impossible.
Mucophagy	The consumption of mucus.
Nacirema	An obscure New World tribe with some interesting practices.
Navel lint	A study proves that most belly button fluff is blue and that women are less likely to have it.
Nasal sebum	Yes, that stuff on the surface of your nose.
Old person smell	Apparently developed to allow humans to avoid partnering with people who are too old for them. Not to be confused with death smell (though they're not incompatible in some places).
Osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis	A tooth in the eye (is worth two in the foot?).
Paleofeces	Our ancestors' poop. Worth a close look, apparently.
Peanut butter test	A diagnostic test for Alzheimer's disease which measures subjects' ability to smell peanut butter through each nostril.
Photic sneeze reflex	People who sneeze when suddenly exposed to bright light.
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis	That's a mouthful! Good thing it has a much shorter name: silicosis.
Powder of sympathy	Healing a wound of war by applying a powder... to the weapon that caused it.
Rapunzel syndrome	Chewing on your hair is one thing, but actually eating it can have some untoward results.
Retained surgical instruments	An unfortunate possible side-effect of surgery.
Schmidt sting pain index	An entomologist is stung by just about everything known to sting and, en route, describes the pain involved in terms of a four-point comparative scale.
Supernumerary nipple	A condition in which one has an additional nipple. Apparently 1 in 18 people have this condition.
Takotsubo cardiomyopathy	Yes, you can die from a broken heart.
Thumb twiddling	Maybe this is unusual to you.
Traditional Chinese medicines derived from the human body	Just because you're not a rhino, or a tiger, or a pangolin, doesn't mean you're safe.
Trepanation	A form of surgery where a hole is drilled or scraped into the skull. It was thought that such a procedure could cure problems like epilepsy or allow a person to enter into a higher state of consciousness.
Uncombable hair syndrome	Not just a bad hair day.

Human sexuality and reproduction

Autocunnilingus	Like autofellatio (see below), but much more difficult.
Autofellatio	Acts of oral self-stimulation.
Armin Meiwes	German guy who met another German guy on a Yahoo Gay-Kannibalengruppe (they exist) in 2001. The rest, as they say, is history...
Bathroom sex	Ever wanted to defecate and have sex at the same time? Well now you can!
Bread dildo	A supposed Ancient Greek sex toy, made of bread.
Cello scrotum	A hoax illness allegedly affecting male cello players.
Coregasm	An orgasm caused by exercising of the core abdominal muscles.
Death during consensual sex	Talk about going out with a bang...
Donkey punch	Allegedly a sex move involving punching one's partner in the back of the head during intercourse.
Female hysteria	A once-common diagnosis of a range of symptoms in women, cured through masturbation.
Footsies	Did you know? It's possible for a couple to flirt by touching each other's legs.
Gerbilling	An urban legend about a sexual practice purportedly conducted. It was made popular by South Park.
Global Orgasm for Peace	Oh yeah, the end of human conflict just turns me on...
Hamster zona-free ovum test	A test – sometimes called a "hamster test" – involving human semen, hamster eggs and a petri dish.
Human penis size	Scientific data on average size, racial variations, surgical enlargement and urban legends.
Koro	A condition where one (mistakenly) believes that his or her genitals are slowly disappearing.
Lithopedion	The rare condition of an unborn fetus calcifying.
Male pregnancy	For now, it's just a seahorse thing, but...
Napoleon's penis	(Allegedly) cut off after his death and, among other things, displayed at a museum in Manhattan.
National Masturbation Day	Not related to the week, and certainly not related to the month.
Parasitic twin	A medical condition where one of two conjoined twins lacks essential organs and must rely on the other for survival, often leeching its blood. An especially rare variant of this, fetus in fetu, involves one partially formed fetus developing within the body of the other.
Persistent genital arousal disorder	Not as funny as it may sound.
Post-coital tristesse	"But after the enjoyment of sensual pleasure is passed, the greatest sadness follows." –Baruch Spinoza
Puppy pregnancy syndrome	A condition found in remote regions of India in which people believe they have conceived a puppy shortly after being bitten by a dog.
Rumpology	Theory that a person's buttocks reveal a person's past and future.
Self-inflicted caesarean section	A harrowing practice, verified to have occurred at least five times.
Sleep sex	A form of parasomnia (similar to sleepwalking) that causes people to engage in sexual acts while they are asleep.
Scrotal inflation	For real now, boys: DO NOT try this at home. You can put your life at risk while doing it.
Smoking fetishism	Apparently, this is a thing.
Soggy biscuit	Don't finish last, whatever you do.
Zombie pornography	Modern reincarnation of necrophilia.

Individual patients and staff

Elisabeth Anderson Sierra	Diagnosed with hyperlactation syndrome, her generous donations of excess breast milk have earned her the title of "Milk Goddess".
Jaxon Buell	A child born with only 20% of a brain. He lived for 5 years despite doctors' expectations that he would only live for 1 year.
Jeanne Calment	A Frenchwoman with the longest verified human lifespan in recorded history. She was 122 at the time of her death.
Stubbins Ffirth	An American trainee doctor who went to unusual lengths in his quest to prove that yellow fever is not contagious.
Phineas Gage	A 19th-century construction worker who survived a three-foot-long (0.91 m) tamping iron going through his skull. His resultant behavioral changes have made him an important figure in the development of neuroscience.
Genie	A feral child who was neglected by her father and was locked in a room for the first 13 years of her life.
James Harrison (blood donor)	An Australian man whose 1,173 blood donations have saved over 2.5 million babies.
Abby and Brittany Hensel	Conjoined twins with separate heads but joined bodies.
Paul Karason	An American man known for having blue skin.
Eugene Landy	A psychologist who developed a form of 24-hour therapy and later became business partners with one of his many celebrity patients, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys.
Hans Langseth	A guy who had the longest beard recorded in history.
Robert Liston	A 19th-century Scottish surgeon who, among other things, performed what has been described as "The only operation in history with a 300 percent mortality rate".
Barry Marshall	A doctor who, against the consensus of mainstream medicine, drank a vial of bacterial culture to prove that stomach ulcers were caused by bacteria rather than stress, spicy foods, and too much acid as was believed at the time. He won the Nobel Prize for it, too.
Alexis St. Martin	A 19th-century French-Canadian fur trader who survived a gunshot wound and was left with a hole in his stomach, which allowed revolutionary experiments on digestion to be conducted.
Lina Medina	A Peruvian girl who gave birth to a son when she was five years old, becoming the youngest human mother on record.
Billy Milligan	A man with 24 personalities, popularized by the 1981 book The Minds of Billy Milligan.
Wenceslao Moguel	A Mexican man suspected of working with the Mexican Revolution who survived his execution and continued to live 61 years afterward.
Blanche Monnier	A French woman who was locked in an attic for 26 years because her parents disapproved of her choice of suitor.
Chandre Oram	A man in India with a 13-inch (33 cm) tail.
Adam Rainer	The only person known to be both a dwarf and a giant.
Tarrare	A Frenchman with an insatiable appetite, who made a show out of his ability to eat just about anything. Including, allegedly, a toddler.
Mary Toft	An English woman who hoaxed doctors into believing that she had given birth to rabbits.

Nervous system and behaviour

Alice in Wonderland syndrome	Distortions of perception that may include one's surroundings appearing too large or too small, faint noises sounding loud, or time slowing to a trickle.
Anton syndrome	People who are blind but convinced they can see.
Bananadine	Exactly how psychedelic are those dried banana peels?
Bicameral mentality	Neuroscientific hypothesis that the human mind before the Bronze Age was split into two discrete components, a speaking mind and obeying mind.
Capgras delusion	When you're sure a friend or loved one is an impostor.
Cortical homunculus	A distorted representation of the human body based on areas of the brain dedicated to processing motor functions for different body parts.
Cotard delusion	Suffered by people, very much alive, who believe they're dead.
Conversion disorder	Blindness and similar disabilities caused by anxiety.
Cute aggression	The reason why people want to squeeze cute things without harm.
Dancing mania	Unknown forces cause large groups of people to dance hysterically until dropping from exhaustion in multiple incidents in Europe from the 13th to 17th centuries.
Electromagnetic hypersensitivity	For those allergic to Wi-Fi.
Encopresis	Voluntary or involuntary defecation in persons who are toilet trained (older than 4 years of age.)
Exploding head syndrome	Ever woken up after an hour or two of sleep thinking you've just heard a massive explosion?
Expressive aphasia	You know when you have a word on tip of your tongue but you just can't remember it? It's that, but with every word.
False memory	Forming of false memories; sometimes leads to thousands of people having the same false memory.
Fugue state	You black out and when you wake up years have passed, you're in a different city, you have a new name and have lived a different life while you were unconscious. Also known as dissociative fugue or psychogenic fugue.
Foreign accent syndrome	A rare medical condition whereby sufferers speak their native language with a foreign accent.
Fregoli delusion	The belief that different people are actually one person in disguise.
Geophagia	Eat dirt, pal.
Homicidal sleepwalking	A real parasomnia that has been successfully used as a defence in court.
Impossible color	Supposed colors that do not appear in ordinary visual functioning.
Jumping Frenchmen of Maine	Like Tourette syndrome, but more Gallic.
Klüver–Bucy syndrome	A behavioral disorder with some very odd symptoms, including "hypersexuality" and a desire to examine objects with the mouth. Named after two doctors who gave psychotropic drugs to lobotomized monkeys.
Mariko Aoki phenomenon	A Japanese expression referring to an urge to defecate that is suddenly felt after entering bookstores.
Paris syndrome	Being clinically disappointed by Paris. Particularly common among Japanese tourists. Not to be confused with Jerusalem syndrome or Stockholm syndrome.
Rosenhan experiment	An experiment involving certifiably sane mental patients.
Somatoparaphrenia	A type of delusion in which a sufferer denies ownership of a limb or an entire side of the body.
Stendhal syndrome	A psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art or natural beauty.
Tanganyika laughter epidemic	What happens when contagious laughter becomes an actual epidemic.
Target fixation	To become so fixated on an object you are trying to avoid that you collide with it.
Tip of the tongue	What was this article was about again... Wait, I think I am just about to remember...
The Truman Show delusion	Those afflicted feel they are being watched all the time by a television audience, like Jim Carrey's character in the 1998 movie The Truman Show.
Urophagia	The consumption of urine. Not always for survival reasons.
Visual release hallucinations	Millions of perfectly sane people are having freakish hallucinations – and just not admitting it.
Zero stroke	An alleged mental disorder that caused patients to write endless rows of zeroes.

Phobias

Cherophobia	Fear of happiness
Chromophobia	Fear of colors
Coprophobia	Fear of feces or even defecation, and possibly enjoying constipation
Dentophobia	Fear of dentists
Emetophobia	Fear of puking
Globophobia	Fear of balloons or balloons popping
Genuphobia	Fear of knees or the act of kneeling
Koumpounophobia	Fear of buttons
Mageiricophobia	Fear of cooking
Numerophobia	Fear of numbers
Osmophobia	Fear of odors and smells
Phallophobia	Fear of the erect penis
Philophobia	Fear of love
Phobophobia	Fear of having a phobia
Pogonophobia	Fear of beards
Submechanophobia	Fear of submerged man-made objects
Technophobia	Fear of computers and internet
Telephobia	Fear of making or answering telephone calls

Animals

Adactylidium	A mite with a very unusual life cycle.
Animals in space	An annotated list of the various animals used in space programs.
Animal attack	Not kidding: death by beavers, bunnies, squirrels, crocodiles, and other creatures you should not have as pets.
Anting (bird activity)	Not recommended for humans.
Apophallation	Are you a slug and can't extract your penis? Amputate and change your gender.
Bee removal	Removal of bees.
Candiru	Barbed fish allegedly attracted to, lodged in, and extracted from human penises.
Carcinisation	Crustaceans may evolve how they wish, but eventually, it all comes back to crab shape.
Common Surinam toad	The mother's back is where the eggs are embedded and where they develop.
Conservation-induced extinction	The extinction of highly endangered parasites at the hands of conservationists.
Depopulation of cockroaches in post-Soviet states	A great ecological problem indeed complete with fourteen references in Russian.
Cat–dog relationship	For centuries the two most popular house pets have been fighting like, well, cats and dogs.
Cymothoa exigua	A parasitic crustacean that, when female (they are hermaphroditic), attaches to and then destroys a fish's tongue, hooks itself to the remaining stub and becomes the fish's new tongue.
Epomis	A deceptive beetle larva that entices its own predators by feigning prey-like movements in order to eat its predator.
Eunice aphroditois	"Armed with sharp teeth, it is known to attack with such speeds that its prey is sometimes sliced in half." As if being a three-metre (9 ft 10 in) worm were not impressive enough.
Goblin shark	Indeed, a monster from the deepest oceans.
Hallucinogenic fish	No, the fish are not trippin'; they will cause hallucinations if ingested. It is not known if hallucinations will occur if one fish consumes another.
Hebrew character	Actually a species of moth.
Hurricane Shark	The meteorological equivalent of Bigfoot. (Except it's real. Kind of. Probably. At least once.)
Israel-related animal conspiracy theories	Has an animal looked suspicious? It was probably Israel.
Jenny Haniver	A grotesque-looking sea monster made from the corpse of a ray.
Lioconcha hieroglyphica	A type of clam with a shell covered in hieroglyphs.
List of animals displaying homosexual behavior	Everything from salmon to seagulls to dragonflies.
List of animal sounds	Snail do "Munch, crunch", Squirrel do "squeak".
List of animals awarded human credentials	Mostly due to pranks pulled on diploma mills.
London Underground mosquito	A species of mosquito that lives in underground railways.
Love dart	Hermaphroditic snails play Cupid.
Lyall's wren	Made extinct by feral cats, possibly the offspring of one pregnant female.
Nightingale excrement as facial	Droppings of a nightingale variety used in facials. Some claim that it helps with acne. Project Medicine states that the references are not MEDRS. (MEDical Reliable Source)
Orbiting Frog Otolith	A NASA frog experiment, sending two bullfrogs into space to test their sense of balance.
Paracerceis sculpta	A species of isopod that has some males that mimic females and others that mimic juveniles, allowing them to mate without the alpha males realising what is going on behind their backs.
Pasilalinic-sympathetic compass	Telepathic communication is not possible in snails no matter how far apart they may be. Nothing else has been ruled out.
Penis fencing	A ~~literal~~ figurative variety of cockfighting between some species of flatworm.
Polar bear jail	For polar bear criminals.
Prostitution among animals	Did you know that prostitution exists among animals?
Rotating locomotion in living systems	Why don't animals have wheels?
Shortarse feelerfish	Bathumycops brevianalis is a fish so named for its short anal fins – brevianalis meaning "short anus".
Supernumerary body part	Having an extra body part, be it as simple as an eleventh finger or as extreme as a second head!
Thagomizer	A feature of Stegosaurus anatomy named after a Far Side comic strip.
Traumatic insemination	A form of mating in invertebrates in which the male stabs the female in the abdomen with his penis, and injects his sperm through the wound.
Trout tickling	Coochy coo!
Uraba lugens	It's called the mad hatterpillar for a reason...
Worm charming	No spade? No worries! There's a better way to get hold of earthworms.

Cats

Bonsai Kitten	The practice of growing small jar-shaped kittens caused controversy years after it was revealed to be a hoax.
Cat burning	A form of entertainment in the Middle Ages, sometimes participated in by royalty.
Demon Cat	A cat that supposedly haunts government buildings in Washington, D.C.
Popular cat names	Cat names, ranked by popularity.
Polydactyl cat	Cats with extraordinary numbers of toes.
Odd-eyed cat	One of the national treasures of Turkey.
Pittsburgh refrigerator cat	A "breed" of cat that lived in refrigerators that people actually believed existed.
Cats That Look Like Hitler	Kitlers exist, live with it.

Cattle

Cow tipping	This actually takes up to 14 people to make it happen.
Hardware disease	A condition in bovines caused by ingesting stray bits of metal.

Chickens

Can *you* tell the boys and girls apart?

Cannibalism in poultry	See: tastes like chicken.
Chicken eyeglasses	Tiny spectacles for chicks, to stop them from seeing red.
Chicken Dance, Chicken (dance)	There is a huge difference.
Chicken gun	Valuable for the mitigation of damage from bird strikes. The chicken carcass must be thawed first, though.
Chicken hypnotism	Have you ever wanted to hypnotize a chicken? If not, why not?
Chicken or the egg	Which came first?
Chicken sexer	A person whose job is to determine the sex of chicken hatchlings.
Chicken powered nuclear bomb	A British project to lay nuclear mines in West Germany during the Cold War that were planned to be kept warm by live chickens.
Empathy in chickens	Have some empathy when eating crunchy chicken nuggets.
Tastes like chicken	But baked, grilled, or fried?

Squirrels

Electrical disruptions caused by squirrels	Two squirrels on a wire...
Squirrel fishing	A sport of skill and patience.
Squirrels on college campuses	Squirrels are noted to be prominent fauna there.

Mammals

This goat has fainted.
It has ceased to stand.

Ambergris	Do you really want to know what your fancy perfume was made from?
Berserk llama syndrome	The result of being too friendly with llamas.
Danish Protest Pig	A pig bred to look like the flag of Denmark, to circumvent prohibition of the flag.
Deer penis	It is said to enhance sexual potency in men and was banned by the Chinese government from the 2008 Olympics.
Diving horse	A short-lived attraction during the 1880s.
The dog ate my homework	Instead of a pathetic excuse for an article, an article about a pathetic excuse.
Domesticated silver fox	Soviet Russia subsidizes the breeding of silver foxes.
Exploding whale	The next time a whale washes on shore in one Oregon county, the authorities will leave the dynamite at home.
Fainting goat	A breed of goat whose muscles freeze for about 10 seconds when it is startled.
Flying primate hypothesis	Hypothesis that megabats are primates like us.
Globster	Blobs of organic matter found washed up on beaches, which are frequently as mysterious as they are disgusting.
Guided rat	Implanted electrodes let researchers "steer the animal over an obstacle course, making it twist, turn and even jump on demand".
House hippo	The world's biggest domestic pest. If you can believe that.
Human	An article that reads as if non-humans wrote it.
Overtoun Bridge	A bridge from which dogs keep leaping to their death.
Quokka	An Australian animal which has developed a habit of posing for selfies with humans.
Panda pornography	Pornographic movies created to achieve sexual arousal for Giant pandas, which have been proven to be unaffected by the popular drug Viagra.
Revival of the woolly mammoth	Plans to clone the woolly mammoth and re-introduce them to Siberia.
Rhinogradentia	A fictitious order of mammal invented by a German zoologist with a sense of humour.
Skunks as pets	For pet owners who like a challenge.
Street dogs in Moscow	Some of them have figured out how to commute using the subway system.
Weasel war dance	The behavior of extremely excited ferrets who are enjoying themselves too much.
What Is It Like to Be a Bat?	Life’s most important questions.
Whale fall	The ecological consequences associated with a dead whale sinking to the seafloor.

Individual animals

52-hertz whale	Dubbed the "world's loneliest whale", it vocalizes at a frequency used by no known whale species.
Adwaita	Possibly the oldest creature of modern times, this 255 year-old tortoise was the former pet of Robert Clive of the British East India Company.
Andy	A footless goose who wore sneakers as prosthesis and was tragically murdered.
Ken Allen	Orangutan in the San Diego zoo who was nicknamed the Hairy Houdini.
Benson	A fish. A big fish. Called Benson.
Bubbles	A chimpanzee who used human toilet facilities, moonwalked, and (allegedly) attempted suicide.
Casper	A cat famed for traveling on a bus around Plymouth, England.
Clever Hans	A horse that allegedly knew arithmetic and could read in German.
Cocaine Bear	A bear found dead in the Tennessee wilderness, having gone through a drug smuggler's dropped bag of cocaine. Inspired a 2023 film (though in that one, the bear didn't just drop dead, as there'd be no plot that way).
Dusty the Klepto Kitty	Redefining the term "cat burglar".
Enumclaw horse sex case	An unfortunate case of a horse riding a man, as opposed to a man riding a horse.
Fungie	Ireland's favourite dolphin.
Gef	A mongoose that talked (allegedly).
George	A lobster weighing 20 pounds (9.1 kg), estimated to be 140 years old.
Grape-kun	A Humboldt penguin who gained worldwide fame after apparently falling in love with a cutout of an anime character.
Grumpy Cat	Unfortunately, this cat couldn't turn that frown upside down.
Hachikō	A well-known story of a Japanese dog that will make you cry by the end of it.
Harambe	A gorilla killed to prevent it killing a child it was saving. Became a meme.
Hanno (elephant)	An Indian elephant that was a gift from the Portuguese king Manuel I to the pope in the 16th century.
Henry the Hexapus	An octopus missing two arms due to an unfortunate birth defect.
Hoover the talking seal	Hoover. A seal. Which talked.
Jack	A Baboon who took over for his disabled owner as an employee of the Cape government railway.
Jackie	A dalmatian dog who was taught by his owner to do the Nazi salute, long before Count Dankula did.
Jeremy	A left-coiled snail who became famous after a campaign to find another left-coiled snail so he could mate.
Joe the Pigeon	Was put on death row for being American, but later acquitted and released. Named after the then President-elect.
Jonathan	Oldest known living terrestrial animal in the world (if it weren't Adwaita). He made the reverse of the 5p of Saint Helena. What have you done?
Jumbo	An elephant with gigantism and legendary circus attraction, who gave his name to large things everywhere.
Khanzir	Possibly the world's loneliest pig. Even more lonely during the swine flu outbreak.
Lily Flagg	A Jersey cow that produced record amounts of butter and got a sizable neighborhood named for her.
Lin Wang	A Taiwanese elephant made famous for his participation in the Second Sino-Japanese War.
Lion of Gripsholm Castle	What happens when you tell a taxidermist who doesn't know what a lion is to stuff and mount a lion.
Lonesome George	The last known individual of the species Pinta Island tortoise. He was known as the rarest creature in the world.
Long Boi	A "exceptionally tall" duck living on the University of York campus.
Mary	Makes the phrase "hung like an elephant" take on a whole new meaning.
Mayor Max II	The world's cutest mayor-for-life creature: a Golden Retriever.
Mike the Headless Chicken	A rooster that lived for 18 months with its head cut off.
Ming	A ~500-year-old clam that was killed when scientists opened its shell to see how old it was.
Nim Chimpsky	A chimpanzee, subject of long-running studies into animal language acquisition, named punningly for linguist Noam Chomsky.
Osama bin Laden	An elusive elephant who terrorized the jungle of Assam. He was eventually shot, but there are those who question the official story of his death. Much like his famous namesake.
Oscar the Cat	A hospice cat who was featured in the New England Journal of Medicine for his purported ability to predict the impending death of terminally ill patients.
Owen and Mzee	Hippo and tortoise that befriended each other after the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.
Paul	A now-deceased psychic octopus who could predict the winner of football games, notably during the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
Potoooooooo	Actually, it's pronounced "potatoes".
Penelope (platypus)	A platypus who faked a pregnancy and escaped from the Bronx Zoo.
Ravens of the Tower of London	Ravens used as soldiers in the Tower of London.
River Thames whale	In 2006, a Northern Bottlenose swam into London and on to the front pages of the British newspapers.
Sergeant Reckless	A horse that held an official rank in the US military, fought in the Korean War and participated in an amphibious landing.
Stubbs	A cat who was the mayor of an Alaskan town for nearly 20 years.
Tamworth Two	Two pigs who, in 1998, escaped an abattoir in England and attracted media attraction. Thanks to a newspaper, they were never made into bacon, ham or sausages.
Tillamook Cheddar	The world's most successful and widely shown animal artist.
Timothy	A tortoise that was present during the bombardment of Sevastopol during the Crimean War in 1854 and survived until 2004.
Tombili	A cat famously pictured looking chill on the streets of Istanbul, who is now immortalised by a statue on the site.
Topsy	An elephant that was electrocuted, as the event was filmed by the Edison Manufacturing Company.
Tuffi	An elephant that survived falling out of a Wuppertal Schwebebahn wagon.
Turra Coo	An insurance protest gone too far.
Ubre Blanca	Fidel Castro's favourite cow that produced 113 liters in one day, and was used as a symbol of superior agriculture under communism. When she died, a marble statue was erected in her memory.
Unsinkable Sam	A cat that has survived the sinking of three ships.
Vacanti mouse	A mouse with a human ear on its back.
Whitney Chewston	A dog that gained fame due to having the manner of a homophobic white woman.
William Windsor	A cashmere goat who served as a lance corporal in the 1st Battalion, the Royal Welsh, an infantry battalion of the British Army.
Wojtek	A soldier of the 22nd Artillery Supply Company of the Polish II Corps who also happened to be a Syrian Brown Bear. He enjoyed beer and cigarettes.

Names in biology

Aha ha	Alan Partridge's favorite wasp?
Anophthalmus hitleri	Rare blind beetle named after Adolf Hitler, poached by collectors of Hitler memorabilia.
Aptostichus stephencolberti	A trapdoor spider named after Stephen Colbert. Naturally, because he asked for it.
Bill Gates' flower fly	A flower fly, Eristalis gatesi, named after Bill Gates.
GoldenPalace.com Monkey	A new species of monkey that was officially named after the GoldenPalace.com online casino.
Harryplax	A genus of crab named in part after the titular character of the Harry Potter franchise. The sole species of this genus is named after the coldly hostile, yet emotion-concealing character from the same franchise.
Mini	A genus of tiny Madagascar frogs containing 3 species: Mini ature, Mini mum, and Mini scule.
Mothers against decapentaplegic	Actually, it's a protein.
Mountain Chicken	Is it a frog or a chicken?
Neopalpa donaldtrumpi	A moth remarkable for its orange head and small genitalia.
Pachygnatha zappa	A spider whose abdominal markings resemble a very famous mustache
Pikachurin	An extracellular matrix-like retinal protein named after Pikachu.
Setaceous Hebrew character	A European moth with wing markings bearing a chance resemblance to a letter in the Hebrew alphabet.
Covered smut False loose smut Loose smut	You may snicker now, but if you had any of these, I guarantee you wouldn't be laughing much.
Sonic hedgehog	A protein in the vertebrate hedgehog family that was officially named after Sega's video game character Sonic the Hedgehog.
Spongiforma squarepantsii	A type of mushroom named after SpongeBob SquarePants.
Strigiphilus garylarsoni	A biting louse named for cartoonist Gary Larson of Far Side fame.
Synalpheus pinkfloydi	A species of snapping shrimp named after the famous English rock band.
Thaumatodryinus tuukkaraski	A wasp named after NHL goaltender Tuukka Rask as both are acrobatic, and have a killer glove hand.
Zombie taxon	Paleontology of the undead.
Zoosphaerium darthvaderi	Named after Darth Vader, this one has an anal shield with a "pronounced bell shape"!
Zyzyxia lundellii and Zyzzyzus warreni	The last plant name and animal name in the dictionary, respectively.

See also

List of organisms named after famous people
List of U.S. state dinosaurs (does not include any of the List of U.S. state fossils)
List of individual pigs

Plants

Bialbero di Casorzo	A cherry tree that grows upon a mulberry tree in Italy.
Chandelier Tree	A 300-foot-tall (91 m) redwood with a giant hole cut through the middle for cars to drive through.
Echinopsis lageniformis	A cactus the Germans call Frauenglück, or "Women's Joy".
Eisenhower Tree	A tree on a golf course that became famous after the President of the U.S. tried and failed to have it taken down.
Golfballia ambusta	Can a burnt golf ball technically be considered a fungus?
Olympic oaks	Gifts from the Führer. Some are still alive.
Moon tree	Trees planted from seeds that were taken into space by Apollo 14.
Nepenthes lowii	A plant that lures animals to release their droppings into a pitcher.
Mimosa pudica	A plant that rapidly closes or folds its leaves after they are touched.
Old Man of the Lake	A 30-foot (9 m) tree stump that has been floating around Oregon's Crater Lake since at least 1896.
Pando	An 80,000 year old quaking aspen colony that is believed to be one of the oldest and heaviest organisms on the planet.
Plant arithmetic	Plants can do math!
Plant rights	If other living beings like humans and animals can have rights, then why not plants?
Pomato	It's both potato and tomato!
Tendril perversion	A geometric phenomenon sometimes observed in helical structures like plant tendrils and telephone handset cords.
Tree of Knowledge (Australia)	Killed by ignorance.
Tree of Ténéré	A solitary acacia that was once the most isolated tree on Earth before being run over by a drunken Libyan truck driver.
Tree That Owns Itself	Its owner loved it so much that he granted it ownership of itself.

See also

List of individual trees

Technology, inventions and products

Long-lost remnant of a cricket game? Made by ancient intelligent life? A mysterious natural phenomenon?

Cower, you leeches, in the presence of the Tempest Prognosticator!

300-page iPhone bill	AT&T Mobility's billing policy for the first iPhone gave a real sense of how much money was being wasted... on paper and printer ink.
Antikythera mechanism	An analog computer built in Ancient Greece.
Baby cage	The pre-War way to get your baby some fresh air if you live in a high-rise apartment. Used by none other than Eleanor Roosevelt.
Bild Lilli doll	A German doll that was the main inspiration for Barbie and is now considered its "grandmother".
Bird strike	Turns out that a bird hitting a plane at a high altitude can make quite a mess.
Blåhaj	Stuffed shark, IKEA bestseller, transgender icon.
Breakout (video game)	How this simple 1976 Atari video game, started by Steve Jobs and finished by Steve Wozniak, helped spur the creation of the Apple II.
*Canard Digérateur*	Or "Digesting Duck", an automaton built to simulate a duck eating, digesting, and excreting.
Centennial Light	A hundred-year-old light bulb that has been burning nonstop for 119 years.
Chindōgu	The practice of inventing solutions to everyday problems that just make the problem worse.
Clocky	An alarm clock that hides from its owner.
Concealing objects in a book	Hopefully you weren't planning to read it before you hollowed it out.
Digital sundial	Unlike an analog sundial, a clock that indicates the current time with numerals formed by the sunlight striking it.
Dreamachine	A device made with a light bulb and a record turntable that reportedly induces lucid dreaming. (And you thought the makers of Die Another Day made it up. There's still no news about invisible Aston Martin V12 Vanquishes.)
Electronic voice phenomenon	Alleged spiritual voices heard in white noise and radio interference.
Friendly Floatees spill	Rubber ducks and their friends who went on a long, long journey.
Gun-powered mousetrap	Patented in 1882. According to its inventor, it can also be used as a booby trap to kill attempted home invaders.
Hitler teapot	Some people thought that this JCPenney teapot resembled the famous dictator.
Marvin Heemeyer	Why it's always a bad idea to put the guy next door out of business if he has a ten-ton armor-plated bulldozer in his garage.
History of perpetual motion machines	The concept has eluded and baffled the greatest minds for thousands of years – and will continue to elude anyone who tries to build one.
Hitachi Magic Wand	Its manufacturers continue to claim that it's just a massager for health purposes and not, you know, the world's best-known sex toy.
Klerksdorp sphere	Spheres with three parallel grooves dated to be three billion years old... Evidence of ancient intelligent life? An unusual natural phenomenon? Who knows...
'Zbigniew Libera'	A polish artist that became infamous for making a piece about legos and the Holocaust. Yikes...
List of inventors killed by their own invention	Perilous parachutes, lethal lighthouses and murderous motorcycles!
Justo Gallego Martínez	A catholic mont from Spain that, over six decades, was involved with the construction of his Catedral de Justo.
Mosquito laser	A bug zapper with a difference.
My Friend Cayla	That doll is a spy!
One red paperclip	A man's small piece of metal turns out to be worth more than expected.
Parking chair	Using household objects to reserve parking spaces.
Pigeon photography	Pigeons were used by the Germans for aerial surveillance in World War I, and apparently also in World War II. Not to forget the CIA's own pigeon camera.
Predictions of the end of Wikipedia	All good things must come to an end...... but not for now.
Project Cybersyn	Chilean robo-socialism control chamber invented by a Brit with a gigantic beard.
Pythagorean cup	When the cup is filled beyond a certain point, it will empty itself.
Quartz crisis	Not a comic book story arc, but the upheaval in watchmaking caused by the introduction of quartz watches.
Royal Mail rubber band	One billion are used every year and often seen littering the streets of UK cities.
Russian floating nuclear power station	Self-contained, low-capacity, floating nuclear power plants.
Sony timer	Rumours that Sony uses a particularly aggressive form of planned obsolescence continue to this day.
Splayd	33.3% spoon, 33.3% knife, 33.3% fork.
Tempest Prognosticator	Meteorology by frightened annelid.
Turboencabulator	A device whose sole function is to expose technological ignorance.
Uncanny valley	How to measure your emotional response to androids.
Useless machine	In most cases, toys for adults.
Vin Mariani	A drink made from cocaine and consumed by Thomas Edison, Pope Leo XIII, Ulysses S. Grant and French prime minister Jules Méline.
Wheat lamp	A type of lamp used by miners that is unrelated to wheat.
Wrap rage	Ever been driven mad by packaging that just won't open?
Xianxingzhe	A Chinese robot, according to the Japanese, that will save its country from corporate capitalism with its crotch cannon.

Hygiene and sanitation

Toilets in Japan have some special features.

Committee to End Pay Toilets in America	A 1970s organization whose campaign was to end pay toilets in the United States of America.
"Darkie" toothpaste	Racist toothpaste from Taiwan.
Fatberg	A congealed lump of fat and non-biodegradable buildup in sewer systems. A 250-metre-long, 140 tonne specimen was discovered under London in September 2017.
Female urination device	Used by women when needing or wanting to pee standing up.
Groom of the Stool	The most intimate Royal office.
Hotel toilet-paper folding	Ever wondered why it was so?
Interactive Urinal Communicator	A talking urinal made for advertising purposes.
iLoo	Microsoft's attempt to bring you the interwebzzz inside the portable public loo.
Jack Black	19th century rat catcher who bred unusually colored rats and sold them as pets.
Japanese toilets	The most advanced toilets in the world with computers, nozzles and flashing lights.
List of people who died on the toilet	You could say they died on the throne.
Lloyds Bank turd	Possibly the largest example of fossilised human feces ever found, discovered under the future site of a Lloyds Bank in England.
Shit flow diagram	This is the technical term.
Stainless steel soap	Metallic soap that removes odours from the hands.
Toilet-related injury	Not all injuries and deaths linked to toilets are urban legends.
Toilet papering	Art or vandalism?
Toilet paper orientation	On the pros and cons of letting toilet paper hang over or under the roll.
Whizzinator	A fake penis used to beat drug tests (complete with dried urine, heater, syringe). Comes in white, tan, Latino, brown, and black
World Toilet Day	International holiday declared by the United Nations.

Clothing and accessories

Aglet	That little plastic or metal thing at the end of your shoelace has a name.
The dress	The biggest question of 2015: Is it white and gold or black and blue?
Fatsuit	Yes, this makes you look fat.
Gorilla suit	What to wear when you don't want to look human.
Koteka	An unusual traditional garment of western New Guinea, also known as the "penis gourd".
Meat dress of Lady Gaga	A dress made of flank steak. Currently preserved as jerky in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Muffin top	A marketing mishap, many well-meaning young women, and vanity came together to form this demographic.
Shoe tossing	The practice of throwing footwear, whether for humorous or political purposes.
Sweater curse	Think your loved one will be pleased if you knit them a sweater? Think again.
Three Wolf Moon	A T-shirt with wolves howling at the moon that gained popularity after one person wrote a parodic review for it on Amazon.com.
Tin foil hat	Headgear which allegedly prevents a person from having their minds read or controlled.

Transport

Don't reach for that sick bag 'til you're back on the floor.

2001 Japan Airlines mid-air incident	Two Japan Airlines aircraft were roughly 135 m (443 ft) away from causing the deadliest aviation accident in history.
2003 Angola 727 disappearance	A Boeing 727 was stolen, with at least two people aboard, and never found.
2018 Horizon Air Q400 incident	A ground service agent with no flight experience whatsoever managed to do insanely difficult aerial maneuvers in a stolen plane that was thought to be impossible to do those maneuvers in.
Aeroflot Flight 593	A plane that crashed because the pilot let his kids fly it.
Aeroflot Flight 6502	A plane that crashed after the pilot made a bet with the first officer that he could land it blind. Unfortunately for 70 people on board, he couldn't.
Aloha Airlines Flight 243	Landed safely and with only one casualty, despite the plane's ceiling flying off mid-flight.
Ampelmännchen	The East German "traffic-light little-man" (Ampelmännchen).
Amtrak paint schemes	Various colors of the National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak).
Animals taking public transportation	Nonhuman commuters.
AVE Mizar	This nightmare lovechild of a Cessna Skymaster and a Ford Pinto eventually killed its inventor.
Bayside Canadian Railway	A 220 foot (70 meter) long railway created solely to exploit a loophole in the Jones Act. U.S. Customs and Border Protection found out and promptly issued a $350 million fine.
Billups Neon Crossing Signal	A local inventor's extreme solution to railway crossing safety.
Boaty McBoatface	What happens when you allow the British public to name a ship in an online poll?
Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Electric Railway	What do you do when there's water in the way of your train? Just build the rails underwater and make the train a moving pier on 23 foot high legs, complete with lifeboats and a requirement a ship captain be aboard at all times.
British Rail flying saucer	Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's the 10:13 to Venus.
Crash at Crush	A high-speed head-on collision between two locomotives, staged as a publicity stunt and attended by an estimated 40,000 people.
China National Highway 110 traffic jam	The world's longest-lasting traffic jam, in which some drivers were stuck for up to 5 days, moving only 1km (0.6 miles) per day.
Cycloped	The entrant into the Rainhill Trial that placed Horse Power against Steam Power.
Dagen H	September 3, 1967: The day that Sweden changed its traffic directionality.
Deli Mike	An aircraft that does what she wants.
Dymaxion car	A 1933 concept car with 3 wheels. It was 20 feet (6.1 m) long, carried up to 11 passengers, could go at speeds of up to 120 miles per hour (190 km/h), and had a steering wheel that turned the car in the opposite direction. One of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion concepts.
Experiment	A boat with eight horse-powers. Literally.
Fastest Shed	Holder of the world land speed record for sheds.
Gadgetbahn	Fun fun fun. And useless.
Get Out and Push Railroad	Just what it sounds like.
Ferry Lina	The world's shortest regular ferry located in Sweden that takes 25-30 seconds (depends of how strong you are).
Gimli Glider	A confusion over units leads to a Boeing 767 plane running out of fuel mid-flight and becoming a glider.
Human mail	Why buy an expensive ticket when you can go by mail?
Iron Dobbin	A mechanical horse made in 1933 for the Italian Fascist Youth Movement.
Jesus nut	Not your local Bible-thumping preacher but the bolt on the top of a helicopter that connects it to the rotor blades.
Loose wheel nut indicator	Yes, those little red tags you see on truck wheels really do have a purpose.
M-497 Black Beetle	The New York Central Railroad decided to see what would happen when they strapped two jet engines on a railcar; this was the result. It currently holds the record for fastest train in the Americas at 183.68 mph (295.6 km/h).
Mile High Club	Soaring members.
Mehran Karimi Nasseri	An Iranian refugee who lived in Charles de Gaulle Airport from 1988 until 2006.
Men's parking space	An antonym to women's parking space. The only known instances are two spaces in a garage in Germany.
Miss Belvedere	A car buried in a time capsule in 1957 and unearthed in 2007, only to discover that it had suffered 50 years of water damage underground and wouldn't start.
MTT Turbine Superbike	The most powerful street-legal motorcycle is run by a turboshaft engine designed for aircraft and can hit 250 mph.
Paternoster lift	Strange European elevators without doors that travel in a loop. Considered by many to be very dangerous.
Parliamentary train	In the United Kingdom, it is cheaper to keep an unwanted railway station open than to close it. This is why there are some railway stations not officially closed with no services in the United Kingdom.
Passenger train toilets	Why passengers must be discouraged from flushing or using toilets while the train is at a station.
Peel P50	The world's smallest production car.
Pimpmobile	Drive like a blaxploitation movie protagonist.
Plastic bicycle	It seems that making bikes out of plastic is not a recipe for success.
PZL M-15 Belphegor	A Soviet attempt at a turbofan-powered crop duster. It is the slowest jet aircraft to enter production as well as the only jet biplane or jet crop duster to exist.
Reliant Regal	A three-wheeled car formerly manufactured in England that could be driven with a motorcycle license.
Rocket mail	The delivery of mail by rocket or missile, attempted by various organisations in many different countries, with varying levels of success.
RP FLIP	A manned ship designed to be capsized at a 90° angle for weeks on end.
Schienenzeppelin	An unholy combination of a Zeppelin and a locomotive.
School bus yellow	A color especially formulated for use on school buses in the United States.
Screw-propelled vehicle	Get there by screwing.
Shipping container architecture	The concept and art of using intermodal containers to build stuff.
Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping Car Porters "George"	An association formed to oppose the dehumanizing custom of addressing railway sleeping car porters as "George" regardless of their actual name.
South Pointing Chariot	An ancient Chinese mechanical compass which took a millennium to reproduce.
Tall bike	A bike which consists of two conventional bicycle frames connected one atop the other.
Train surfing	As respectable and practical as drying one's hair in most parts of the world.
Unused highway	Lost highways, unloved and unused.
Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571	Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, later known as the Andes Flight Disaster and the Miracle of the Andes, was a chartered flight that originated in Montevideo, Uruguay, where the passengers were forced to resort to cannibalism after it crashed.
USGlobal Airways	An active airline founded in 1989 that has never operated a single commercial flight.
Vomit Comet	Lack of gravity is not good for the stomach.
Vortech Meg-2XH Strap-On	A discontinued strap-on helicopter designed for amateur construction. Somehow no lawsuits are mentioned in the article.
Wallsend Metro station	All railroads lead to Rome. With "no smoking" signs, although tobacco was unknown to ancient Romans...
Westray to Papa Westray flight	The world's shortest passenger flight, lasting as little as 53 seconds. Just don't expect an in-flight meal.
The wrong type of snow	Possibly the most feeble excuse for why British trains are so awful.

Computing

.bv	A top-level domain that isn't being sold, made for an Antarctic island where no one lives.
.nu	Niue's top-level domain, which is regulated by Sweden and almost exclusively used by European countries.
.su	How a piece of the Soviet Union´s internet is not only still online but also still in use to this day.
.tv	Sales of websites under this top-level domain name make up 10% of Tuvalu's GDP.
Any key	Press any key to continue.
Blinkenlights	DAS KOMPUTERMASCHINE IST NICHT FÜR DER GEFINGERPOKEN UND MITTENGRABEN!
Bogosort	The world's worst sorting algorithm works like this: Randomise the list. Is it in order? If not, try again.
The Book of Mozilla	A well-known computer Easter egg found in the Netscape and Mozilla series of browsers.
Brainfuck	An intentionally difficult to use programming language containing only eight commands.
Brian's Brain	He's so smart, he has his own cellular automaton.
Bush hid the facts	Revelations of a vast right-wing conspiracy, or just a glitch?
Chudnovsky brothers	A pair of mathematicians who built a supercomputer out of spare parts.
Conway's Game of Life	A simple game with only three rules that people have made beautifully complex machines with, including a computer that runs Conway's Game of Life.
Electric unicycle	The ongoing academic effort to teach robots to ride unicycles.
Elvis operator	An operator in programming languages with an unusual name.
Emojli	A defunct emoji-only social network. Started as a parody of Yo (see below).
Esoteric programming language	Refers to programming languages designed as a test of the boundaries of computer programming language design, as a proof of concept, or as jokes, and not with the intention of being adopted for real-world programming.
Evil bit	Indicates if a packet has been sent with malicious intent, so that it can be ignored.
Guru Meditation error	If you thought the blue screen of death was bad, this computer error would hamper your quest to reach Nirvana.
Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol	Protocol for controlling and monitoring coffee pots. Attempting to use a teapot while brewing coffee will yield you the "HTTP 418: I'm a teapot" error message.
I Am Rich	You must be if you could afford this US$999.99 iPhone application that only displayed a red gem and a (misspelled) mantra.
International Obfuscated C Code Contest	A competition to create code that no human can read.
IP over Avian Carriers	An Internet protocol for sending data packets using homing pigeons.
iSmell	A computer peripheral designed to emit smells for websites and emails, later named one of the "Worst Tech Products" by PC Magazine.
Leet	T3h 1@ngu/\&e 0f H@xx0rz.
Lenna	How an image of a nude Playboy model became the industry-standard digital image compression test subject.
Loab	According to AI, the exact opposite of many prompts is the same picture of an old woman.
lp0 on fire	Want to panic a Unix user? Display an error that their printer is on fire.
Macquarium	Vintage Macintosh computers-turned-fishtanks.
Magic smoke	When a chip fails, it's because the smoke has gotten out.
The Million Dollar Homepage	A web page sold for advertising space at 1 dollar per pixel.
MONIAC	A water-based analogue computer used to model the United Kingdom economy, bringing a new meaning to the term liquidity.
On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science	A 1990 academic paper which argues that computer programming should be understood as a branch of mathematics, and that the formal provability of a program is a major criterion for correctness.
Pentium F00F bug	An Intel Pentium bug with an unusual name.
Reality distortion field	Surely an obscure quantum-physics phenomenon? Nope!
Rubber duck debugging	Code debugging by explaining your code to a rubber duck. Quack!
Rubber-hose cryptanalysis	Cryptography by other means.
Scunthorpe problem	Spam filtering based on text strings can cause problems. Just ask the residents of S****horpe.
Send Me To Heaven	A mobile game won by throwing your phone as close to heaven as you can without it getting there.
Tay (chatbot)	An artificial intelligence chatbot designed by Microsoft to learn the speech patterns of the Twitter users who interacted with it, Tay lasted 16 hours before becoming too racist to remain online.
TempleOS	A biblical-themed operating system designed by a single schizophrenic programmer over the course of 10 years after receiving instructions from God. Some assembly required.
Trojan Room coffee pot	The fascinating target of the world's first webcam: a coffee machine at the computer science department of Cambridge University.
Utah teapot	A 3D model which has become a standard reference object (and something of an in-joke) in the computer graphics community.
Yo	A messaging service whose only function was to send "Yo" to people.

Popular culture, entertainment and the arts

C'est Le Pétomane – who "performed" for royalty.

Action Park	"There's nothing in the world like"... hiring untrained teenagers, plying guests with alcohol, and letting the accidents stack right up. Most infamously poor ride idea: a water slide with a vertical loop, so dangerous it was barely ever open.
"The Aristocrats"	A joke considered to be both "the world's funniest" and "the world's worst". Also a 2005 documentary of the same name.
Baseball metaphors for sex	Two of America's favorite pastimes.
Beezin'	A fad in which people apply Burt's Bees lip balm to their eyelids.
Bigipedia	A unique experiment in "broadwebcasting", Bigipedia is the website on your radio. In association with Chianto—"Officially recognised by the EU as a wine-type product or by-product".
"Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them!" controversy	T-shirt slogan aimed towards young women, rocks aimed towards young men.
George P. Burdell	A fictitious student officially enrolled at Georgia Tech in 1927, and, except for his "service" in World War II, has been continuously enrolled at the school ever since.
The Campaign for North Africa	The world's most complex board game. It has 6 rulebooks, is estimated to require 20 years to complete, and despite being released in 1978, not a single game has ever been finished (even though the actual campaign for north Africa only lasted 3 years.)
Conan the Librarian	A perennial parody of Conan the Barbarian that has appeared in film, television, comics, and fan fiction.
Croydon facelift	A hairstyle peculiar to parts of England.
Cultural depictions of Napoleon	Fictional characters believing they are Napoleon are often used to suggest mental ill health.
Cultural history of the buttocks	A cheeky article.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude	A pair of 20th century artists that became famous for their colossal side ecological works, such as 1972's Valley Curtain and 2012's The Floating Piers.
Dick joke	Jokes about dicks.
Evil clown	A recent development in American popular culture in which the playful trope of the clown is rendered as disturbing through the use of dark humor and horror elements.
F.A.T.A.L.	The worst-reviewed tabletop role-playing game of all time, where you roll for your character's anal circumference and can listen to a theme song that "sounds like the Cookie Monster chasing a drum kit being pushed down a flight of stairs".
Flash mob	Wherein a group of people quickly meet up, engage in a random action such as a pillow fight, then disappear just as quickly.
Frozen Peas	Orson Welles: brilliant director, notorious pitchman.
Fuck for Forest	Do your bit to save the rainforest—have an orgy!
Ashrita Furman	Holds the Guinness World Record for holding the most Guinness World Records.
Garden hermit	In case you are in need of some backyard friends.
Ghost riding	A trend popularized by hyphy culture.
Gongoozler	A person who likes to watch British canals.
Great Stork Derby	What could possibly be in the will of a notorious practical joker?
Gurn	A Western term for creating odd appearances of the face.
Human rainbow	A huge gathering of colours.
Hundeprutterutchebane	Translates to Dog Fart Roller Coaster. It is a flatulence-themed roller coaster.
Issei Sagawa	Writer, commentator, minor celebrity, murderer, and cannibal.
Kayfabe	In professional wrestling, the portrayal of events within the industry as real.
Alvin "Shipwreck" Kelly	Claimed to have survived five shipwrecks, three car crashes and two plane crashes, and still found time to create a craze for sitting on a flagpole for hours at a time.
Killer toy	When children's toys attack!
Kuchisake-onna	A Japanese urban legend (probably). Also known as "the slit-mouthed woman", Kuchisake-onna is asking you if you think she's pretty. No matter what you answer, you're doomed. Except if you say "pomade" three times.
Lawnchair Larry flight	Successfully piloted a lawn chair to 16,000 feet (4,900 m) over Los Angeles.
Le Pétomane	A French entertainer famous in Victorian times for being able to break wind at will. Practitioners of this... art are called flatulists.
Lighthouse and naval vessel urban legend	An old classic for those who like a laugh at the expense of the US Navy.
List of defunct amusement parks	I thought Marine World was open! Darn it...
List of games with concealed rules	Games with clear, obvious rules can be so boring.
List of incidents at Walt Disney World	Did you think that Mickey's home would only be a place of sunshine and fun times? Think again.
Lincoln–Kennedy coincidences urban legend	Turns out, they have a bit of similarities with each other (not really).
Love lock	Padlock your love to a fence, and throw away the key.
Masturbate-a-thon	It's okay – it's for charity!
Metafiction	Fiction about fiction.
Miss Bumbum	An annual beauty pageant to find Brazil's best buttocks.
Mooning the Cog	Bad weather isn't the only reason to avoid the summit of Mount Washington.
Nazi chic	The approving use of Nazi-era style, imagery, and paraphernalia in clothing and popular culture.
No soap radio	A prank joke intended to fool one of its listeners into believing that it is a joke.
Nukemap	New York got blown up by the Tsar Bomba! Well, at least you can do that in this.
Robert Opel	The life and eventual murder of the streaker of the 46th Academy Awards.
Pass by catastrophe	Has your college just burnt down? Congrats, you now have a bachelor's degree! Sadly, that isn't really the case in reality.
Pen spinning	An activity in which assorted tricks are used to manipulate a pen in aesthetically pleasing ways.
Aron Ralston	One tough guy who, to escape from death, cut off his own arm with a dull knife after a boulder fell on it. Inspired the movie 127 Hours.
Real-life superhero	All you need is a cape and a dream.
Sardarji joke	Popular jokes in India, based on stereotypes of Sikhs.
Self-referential humor	A joke that refers to itself as the joke.
Sewer alligator	A legend that became a pop culture sensation.
Stunting	The things radio stations and TV networks will do for attention.
Treacle mining	The fictitious mining of treacle (molasses) in a raw form similar to coal.
Umarell	Old people who watch construction sites.
Voluntary Human Extinction Movement	A group of people trying to get everyone to stop reproducing.
When a white horse is not a horse	A Chinese philosophy about a white horse either being a horse or not being a horse.
Works based on dreams	Sometimes you should follow your dreams; after all, it might lead you to create the most-covered song in the world, write Frankenstein, or discover the structure of the atom.
World Famous Bushman	A street entertainer in San Francisco who makes a living by pretending to be a bush.
You kids get off my lawn!	I'm gonna call your parents, you kids!

Art

747 (performance art)	A performance art piece in which the artist fired shots at a Boeing 747 flying overhead, leading him to be questioned by the FBI.
Ambigram	A type of calligraphic design that includes words which read the same when reversed or flipped upside down.
America	A fully-functioning solid gold toilet, on display (and available for use) in one of New York's finest art museums.
Artist's Shit	A quite literal and humorous meta-art.
Australia's big things	Giant folk art as tourist traps.
Augsburg Book of Miracles	A book dated from the 16th century full of weird religious drawings. Featuring a human–donkey–demon hybrid as one of its highlights.
Babylonokia	Clay Nokia phone with cuneiform keys.
Bog Standard Gallery	It's a museum... inside a portable toilet.
Boll Weevil Monument	The only known monument built to honor an agricultural pest.
Bottle Rack	A modern art piece created by Dada artist Marcel Duchamp. His sister, who mistook it for trash, threw it out.
Pierre Brassau	"That's not art; a chimp could have painted that!"
Cabazon Dinosaurs	Comprises of "Dinny the Dinosaur," a larger-than-life, 150 ton sculpture of a brontosaurus in the desert of Southern California west of Palm Springs. Dinny's companion is "Mr. Rex," a 150 ton sculpture of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Made by people that think dinosaurs never existed.
Chamber of Art and Curiosities, Ambras Castle	A cabinet of curiosities created by Ferdinand II, Archduke of Austria in the 16th century.
Cool S	A symbol of uncertain origins often used in graffiti.
Degenerate Art exhibition	When the Nazis exhibited examples of art that they didn't consider "purely German" enough, so people could hate it in person. It ended up drawing visitor numbers that regular art galleries in the country could only dream of.
Droste effect	The effect of a picture appearing within itself.
Disumbrationism	A novelist who's never picked up a paintbrush before creates a false art school and submits amateurish paintings as part of it... and is successful for a while.
Earring Magic Ken	How Barbie's boyfriend, in an attempt to look cooler, became a gay icon.
Ecce Homo	An otherwise-unremarkable fresco of Jesus that was "restored" by an untrained amateur and now looks like a monkey.
Equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington, Glasgow	How a traffic cone became a part of a 19th Century statue
Fire photography	The act of taking photographs of firefighting operations.
Fourth plinth, Trafalgar Square	The horse is missing.
Fremont Troll	An 18 foot, 13,000 pound concrete sculpture of a troll clutching a VW beetle located in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, Washington.
Gävle goat	A giant straw Yuletide goat that is the target of frequent arson attacks and vandalism.
Geostationary Banana Over Texas	An Argentinian artist's plan(?) to launch a banana-shaped airship over Texas.
Hahn/Cock	A giant blue cock in Trafalgar Square.
Headington Shark	Oxford man has had a 25-foot (7.6 m) long sculpture of a shark embedded headfirst into the roof of his unassuming house since 1986.
He-gassen	It really puts the "art" in "fart".
Hellmouth	The entrance to Hell envisaged as the gaping mouth of a huge monster, an image which first appears in Anglo-Saxon art.
Hobby tunneling	Some people just love to dig.
Howard Hallis	An artist who attempted to draw the "Picture of Everything", a massive painting containing drawings of thousands of people and items, both real and imaginary.
Megumi Igarashi	Perhaps the world's most prominent in the field of drawing and sculpting the vulva.
Jazz	An iconic 1990s disposable cup design.
Katrina refrigerator	Loot this! Free meal inside!
Knitta Please	NY Hip hop graffiti knitters.
Kryptos	A sculpture on the grounds of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency containing four encrypted messages, only three of which have been solved.
Latte art	The best art is caffeinated.
Latrinalia	The sage and insightful scribblings on your local public bathroom wall.
List of largest photographs	Includes information on print and digital photos that are reputedly the world's largest.
Museum of Bad Art	A Museum "dedicated to the collection, preservation, and exhibition of really awful artwork".
Emil Nolde	The curious case of an artist who was an avid supporter of Nazism, yet was later featured in the country's "degenerate art" gallery.
Paintings by Adolf Hitler	The Nazi dictator and perpetrator of one of the worst genocides in history was also a painter.
Pantone 448 C	"Drab dark brown", the least attractive colour, according to research. Used for plain tobacco packaging.
Phallic architecture	Does the Washington Monument, Ypsilanti Water Tower or Peoples Daily building remind you of something?
Pink Lady	In 1966, a woman secretly painted a 60-foot (18 m) tall portrait of a nude woman over a tunnel and sued when the county tried to take it down.
Piss Christ	A photograph of a crucifix submerged in the artist's urine.
Portland International Airport carpet	A carpet design so famous that it gained a cult following.
Pricasso	A man who paints with his genitalia.
La Princesse	A 15-metre (50 ft) mechanical spider which stomped about Liverpool in 2008.
Project Graham	A work of art "symboliz[ing] the vulnerability of human bodies in [car] crashes".
Abel Ramírez Águilar	A Mexican sculptor who made a name for himself in ice and snow sculpture after winning gold at the 1992 Winter Olympics.
Le Rêve (Picasso)	A Picasso painting that purportedly would have sold for a record price had its owner, Steve Wynn, not accidentally poked a hole in it, and which eventually did sell for a different record price.
Roundabout dog	Seen any dog on the loose while out driving lately? Chances are it's a roundabout dog.
Sacred Cod	There's also a "Holy Mackerel", Batman.
Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism	Mine is better than yours.
Seedfeeder	An illustrator who contributed around 48 free-use drawings to Wikipedia, each being sexually-graphic drawings for articles on each (in)appropriate act. Lives up to their name, don't they?
Les songes drolatiques de Pantagruel	A spin-off of the famous medieval book Pantagruel, about the adventures of a gluttonous gigantic being; in the illustrated book, we can have a clue of what that wonderful fella dreams at night. Spoiler alert: it's all hellish creatures.
Superlambanana	A statue in Liverpool that's half-lamb, half-banana.
Tennis Girl	Photo of a girl with no underwear that became so popular politicians began to cosplay it.
Thomasson	Finding the art in things that are still maintained despite being useless.
Tillie	An odd painting of a grinning face, that used to be on the Palace Amusements building in Asbury Park, New Jersey before it was demolished.
Tipu's Tiger	A very... curious mechanical toy created for Indian ruler Tipu Sultan that represents his feelings for the expansionist East India Company on the Indian sub-continent.
Turnip Prize	The prize that satirises modern art by giving awards to low-effort collections of junk. Bonus points for titling it with a bad pun.
Unique Forms of Continuity in Space	At least sixteen casts of this "unique" sculpture exist. Not to mention that the sculptor already made a few similar designs.
William Utermohlen	Utermohlen was an artist who drew self-portraits after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1995, and would continue these portraits for six years, until 2001.
les UX	A French artistic movement that expresses itself in underground places.
The Woman with the Handbag	A very famous photo taken in Sweden where a woman hit a Neo-Nazi with her handbag.

Comics and animation

101 Uses for a Dead Cat	A collection of illustrations all about exactly that, which sold over 2 million copies.
Acme Corporation	Their products have been used and endorsed by all the best cartoon characters.
Afghanis-tan	Central Asian history has never been cuter. (Osama bin Laden makes an appearance as a turban-wearing stray cat.)
Archie Meets the Punisher	The team-up you thought would never happen.
Archie vs. Predator	Teenagers somehow become worthy game.
Arm-Fall-Off-Boy	The first applicant to be rejected from the Legion of Super-Heroes. His superpower was the ability to temporarily detach either arm and use it as a club with the other.
Arseface	A comic book character from none other than Vertigo Comics.
Behind Closed Doors (book)	An unreleased book of pornographic SpongeBob SquarePants drawings by some of the storyboard artists, partially leaked in July 2023.
Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo	Name of a Japanese manga (comic) whose subject matter is as surreal as its title.
Cartoon physics	In animation, humour takes precedence over the ordinary laws of physics.
Censored Eleven	A group of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons pulled from syndication due to their racist depictions of black people.
Cheat Slayer	An isekai manga axed after one chapter after it was noticed that the villains were thinly-veiled clones of other isekai heroes.
Clan McDuck	A fictional family in the style of a Scottish clan, from which a great number of Walt Disney Company's comic book characters held their origin.
Corona-chan	Fictional personification of the coronavirus which caused racial controversies.
Cow Tools	A cartoon from the comic strip The Far Side that was so confusing thousands of people called the author trying to understand its meaning.
Comic book death	Comic book characters have a tendency to rarely, if ever, stay dead.
Der Fuehrer's Face	Donald Duck won an Oscar as a Hitler-saluting Nazi.
Ebola-chan	Fictional personification of the Ebola virus promoted with racist intentions.
Gorillas in comics	A curious abundance of gorillas in comic book plots during the Silver Age of Comics.
Homosexuality in the Batman franchise	Do Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson do more together than fighting crime?
ISIS-chan	Fictional manga character created by Japanese internet users to oppose ISIS propaganda.
Jenny Everywhere	An open-source webcomic character.
Kuso Miso Technique	A homoerotic, scatological manga that ended up becoming an online meme.
The Metric Marvels	A spinoff of Schoolhouse Rock that was part of the 1970s campaign to encourage use of the metric system in the U.S.
Moe anthropomorphism	Even a washing machine can be the girl of your dreams.
Mr. Immortal	A Marvel Comics superhero with no special powers except immortality, who has been killed in ways including crushing, burning, self-impalement on giant novelty scissors, bear trap, cannon, chainsaw, piranhas, ferrets, spear, python, and alcohol poisoning (three times). Prone to fits of rage upon returning to life.
NFL SuperPro	A comic book series about a super American football player, perhaps taking Super Bowl too far.
Pinky & Pepper Forever	A short furry graphic novel dealing with themes such as Catholicism, lesbianism, relationship struggles, BDSM, suicide, and the afterlife, expressed through characters from a short-lived line of fashion dolls.
Squirrel and Hedgehog	The height of the North Korean animation industry. A tale of talking animals as an allegory for the North Korean version of history, featuring Americans depicted as laser-eyed wolves.
Syaoran Li *Syaoran (Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, clone)* *Syaoran (Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, original)*	What happens on Wikipedia when a group of manga artists take a character from one of their earlier works and perform several cross-references and plot twists.
Tentacle erotica	Human-cephalopod sexual relations, popular in hentai.
Tiger Mask donation phenomenon	The other time manga's most famous pro wrestler entered the real world.
Truck-kun	The character responsible for sending more protagonists to other worlds than any other.

Literature

"Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī... help!!

112 Gripes About the French	A handbook produced to help American soldiers understand the French.
A Void	An entire novel written without using the letter e.
A True Story	A second century Ancient Greek novella written to make fun of the myths and tales that were frequently reported as true in sources of the time. In modern times, it has become recognized as the first ever work of fiction to feature space travel and interstellar warfare. The story ends with "the biggest lie of all" - a promise of future sequels.
Aldiborontiphoskyphorniostikos	Published in 1825 as a Victorian children's book and described as "a round game for merry parties", the object of the game was to quickly recite alphabetical tongue-twisting mock-Latin gibberish.
Alien space bats	An implausible divergence from the real world, used as a plot device in alternate history.
Anthropodermic bibliopegy	The practice of binding books in human skin.
Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication	Your helpful NASA guide on talking to aliens.
Atlanta Nights	A group of science fiction authors get together and deliberately write an absolutely horrible novel to fool and embarrass a "vanity publisher".
Betteridge's law of headlines	Why, when a newspaper asks a yes-no question, the answer is usually "no".
Big Dumb Object	Objects in science fiction literature and media that are specifically created to be interesting. Too bad they'll probably be overlooked with a name like this...
The Book of Heroic Failures	A book which glorifies failure. Started off by The Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain. The book was a success and thus declared a "failure as a failure".
Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year	Who can forget such classics as Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, How to Avoid Huge Ships or Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Power: How to Increase the Other 90% of Your Mind to Increase the Size of Your Breasts?
La Bougie du Sapeur	A French newspaper published every February 29th.
Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest	A contest to find the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.
Cain's Jawbone	A murder mystery puzzle book that only three people have solved since it was published in 1934.
The Anarchist Cookbook	Have you ever been in need of an easy-to-follow bomb manual? Well, now you have it.
Codex Seraphinianus	An illustrated encyclopedia of an imaginary world, written in an imaginary language.
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater	This highly popular autobiographical account about the effects of laudanum led several English authors to opium use.
Henry Darger	Writer of a 15,000-page manuscript along with several thousand watercolor paintings and other drawings illustrating the story, who rarely left his small room. His word was worth millions a few years after his death.
Dinosaur erotica	Have you ever been Taken by a T-Rex or Ravished by a Triceratops?
Death poem	The urge to have famous last words, taken to its logical, carefully rewritten extreme.
Empty book	A literal example of why you should not judge a book by its cover.
English as She Is Spoke	A 19th-century Portuguese–English conversational guide and phrase book that is regarded as a classic of unintentional humour since it was apparently the product of translating a Portuguese–French phrase book by non-English-speaking Portuguese with the help of a French–English phrase book.
English-language editions of The Hobbit	Now collectors' items because of their printing differences.
Evil laughter	"Mua-ha-haha-ha-haaa" and the like.
The Eye of Argon	An infamously bad heroic fantasy novella, written in 1970 by Jim Theis and circulated anonymously in science fiction fandom since then.
Fallout: Equestria	A five volume, 620,000-word long crossover fanfiction of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and the post-apocalyptic Fallout video game series.
Fart Proudly	An essay written by Benjamin Franklin about flatulence.
The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women	A 1558 diatribe by John Knox against Mary, Queen of Scots and Mary Tudor.
Fly Fishing by J. R. Hartley	A non-existent book by a non-existent author, created for a Yellow Pages UK ad, and made real eight years later.
"For sale: baby shoes, never worn"	Supposedly the shortest story possible in the English language, though Ernest Hemingway had nothing to do with it.
Future Library project	Project that collects an original work by a popular writer every year from 2014 to 2114. The works will remain unread and unpublished until 2114; one thousand trees were specially planted for the project; the 100 manuscripts will be printed using paper made from the trees.
Gadsby	A 50,110-word long book famous for not using the letter "e".
Grammarians' War	At the start of the 16th century, British schoolmasters were insulting one another. In Latin, of course.
Hawking Index	Are you one of the 1.9% to have read Hillary Clinton's Hard Choices from cover-to-cover?
Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed	The perfect picture book for your little conservative.
Hitler Diaries	A sensational discovery in 1983, which turned out to be an elaborate hoax.
Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles	An evangelical Christian version of the Harry Potter series, featuring creationism, anti-Catholicism, and Biblical references that assume you have a Bible handy. Maybe written by a traditionalist wife and mother for her children, maybe a hoax - who knows?
How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming	No, this isn't about the murder of a Disney character. This is the memoir of the man responsible for declassifying Pluto.
Hundred Thousand Billion Poems	Raymond Queneau's 1961 book consisting of ten sonnets printed on card with each line on a separate strip. As all ten sonnets have not just the same rhyme scheme but the same rhyme sounds, any lines from a sonnet can be combined with any from the nine others, allowing for 10¹⁴ (= 100,000,000,000,000) different poems.
I Am a Cat	A novel written from the perspective of a cat.
I Am God	A novel in which God is made to keep a diary to chronicle his love for an atheist.
I, Libertine	A non-existent novel that was the subject of a hoax intended to criticize the manner in which best-seller lists are determined.
If Israel Lost the War	A very soft alternate history romance.
The Iraq War: A Historiography of Wikipedia Changelogs	A 2010 book, divided into 10 editions, entirely about Wikipedia changes made on page about the Iraq War (2003-2011) when the US was still involved in the confrontation.
The Jungle	a 1906 book that is best described as "Watergate" for the meat industry.
Lajja (novel)	How this 1993 novel was the primary reason for the exile of its author overseas.
Lecherous Limericks	Dirty limericks... by Isaac Asimov.
Lesbian vampire	They don't bite...necks.
"Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den"	A poem written by a Chinese poet in Classical Chinese. It can be read and understood by all who understand the language, even though it consists entirely of the word "shi" repeated 92 times in different tones.
Lobby Lud	"You are ____ and I claim my five pounds".
Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphiokarabomelitokatakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon	A fictional dish with a quite long name.
Magical Negro	An outdated stock character who helps out white protagonists.
Manga Bible	And the Lord said unto John, "Omae wa mō shinde iru".
Marlovian theory of Shakespeare authorship	A theory which states that Christopher Marlowe's unnatural death was a hoax and that he continued to write and publish under the pseudonym "William Shakespeare".
William McGonagall	A writer widely held to be the worst poet in the English language.
Men in Aida	A homoerotic homophonic translation of Homer: "Men in Aida, they appeal, eh? A day, O Achilles."
The Meaning of Hitler	Sir Max Hastings called it 'among the best' studies of Hitler
Yukio Mishima	A nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature who is perhaps more notorious for attempting a ultranationalist coup d'etat against the Japanese government, despite only being supported by four other people. After this inevitably failed, he committed seppuku, and speculation as to his true psychological motives has raged ever since.
Mock Turtle	The weirdest, and least recorded, character in Alice in Wonderland.
*My Immortal*	A legendarily terrible piece of Harry Potter fan fiction that awkwardly inserted vampires, time travel, and emo/"goff" subcultures into J.K. Rowling's wizarding world. Someone who may have been the author of the piece almost got a major publishing deal for her memoirs.
Naked Came the Stranger	Journalists prove a point when their intentionally awful sex novel becomes a bestseller. Later the basis of a porn film starring Darby Lloyd Rains.
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats	Cat poems by T. S. Eliot.
Order of the Occult Hand	"It was as if an occult hand had edited this Wikipedia article."
On Bullshit	A very serious essay by Harry Frankfurt sketching a philosophical theory of, well, bullshit.
Ossian	"The greatest poet that has ever existed", according to Jefferson. But he didn't.
P Is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever	"M" is for... mnemonic? "B" is for bdellium? What?
Philip M. Parker	Writer of “The 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India” and thousands of other works... by means of a computer program.
Political interpretations of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz	Understanding the political context of the mid-to-late 1890s in the United States will give you a different understanding of the gold, silver and emerald symbolism, among other things.
Rangila Rasul	How this religious satire made a massive controversy between India's Muslim and Hindu communities, and helped change the nation's legal system.
Rolling Stone (Uganda)	The Ugandan version isn't a music magazine, but instead tries to out gay men and get them killed.
Amanda McKittrick Ros	The McGonagall of prose. J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis competed as to who could read her longest without laughing.
Pinocchio paradox	What if Pinocchio said his nose will grow?
Print Wikipedia	Yes, it does exist.
Saddam Hussein's novels	Crimes against literature?
The Satanic Verses	An infamous fictional play that to this day endangers its author's life due to religious fanatics. But not the ones that you might be thinking of.
Shakespeare apocrypha	Anti-Stratfordians (see "Shakespeare authorship question" below) can take heart that there really are works attributed to Shakespeare that weren't written by him!
Shakespeare authorship question	A great conspiracy that concealed the identity of the true author of "Shakespeare's" works, implying that all contemporary references to Shakespeare's authorship were fraudulent or mistaken.
Society of Science, Letters and Art	19th century bogus literary society which duped learned (and would-be learned) people into purchasing the right to the society's academic dress and letters after their name.
Peter Sotos	A writer and musician who explores serial killer and pedophile lore, while simultaneously praising them in his work. For one of his magazine covers, he used an image taken from real child pornography, which he plead guilty to possessing.
Striking and Picturesque Delineations of the Grand, Beautiful, Wonderful, and Interesting Scenery Around Loch-Earn	Angus McDiarmad, a native Scots-Gaelic speaker, writes a book on a Scottish Highland area with the help of an English dictionary to great comic effect and is termed "the world's worst author".
The Tale of Two Lovers	A 15th century erotic novel written by a future pope.
There once was a man from Nantucket...	A gratifying theme for limericks; some of them obscene.
Time travel in The Lord of the Rings	Turns out time travel is embedded into The Lord of the Rings in several different ways.
Le Train de Nulle Part	A French novel, 233 pages long, written without verbs.

Music

27 Club	A number of prominent musicians have died at this age, though statisticians attribute the "club" to apophenia – seeing patterns in random data. See also the related white lighter myth.
Animutation	The practice of taking lyrics of foreign songs, "mishearing" them into English, and producing a Flash video to go along with it.
Bouncing ball	That thing in music videos that helps you sing along to the lyrics. It dates back to 1924.
"Brian Wilson is a genius"	A music journalist's meme from the 1960s that arguably destroyed the career of the Beach Boys' main songwriter and producer. (Within three years, Wilson was working as a grocery store cashier.)
Characters in Devo music videos	Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Wikipedia!
"Clapton is God"	Graffiti that's famous for a photo of a dog urinating on it.
Clear Channel memorandum	America banning Learn to Fly by Foo Fighters from radio airplay after 9/11 is an odd choice. Though What a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong brings to mind more questions.
Curse of the ninth	The superstition that any composer of symphonies, from Beethoven onwards, will die soon after writing their own Ninth Symphony.
The Dark Side of the Rainbow	What happens when you mix Pink Floyd and The Wizard of Oz?
Earworm	It's got a hook in you.
Elvis impersonator	People pretend to be Elvis Presley and only him.
Elvis sightings	There are many who still believe.
Fogerty v. Fantasy, Inc.	That time John Fogerty was sued for sounding like himself.
Fyre Festival	The organizers spent so much money promoting the event that they ran out of money to spend on the actual event. They were later faced with eight lawsuits.
Industrial musical	Not a subgenre of industrial music, but a musical production performed for the employees of a business, intended to create a feeling of being part of a team, or to educate and motivate the management and salespeople to improve sales and profit.
Lebenslaute	Open air classical music performances as a form of political protest.
List of classical music concerts with an unruly audience response	Concerts which didn't work out quite as well as hoped.
Literal music video	What happens when you replace the lyrics in a music video with lyrics that describe what's actually happening in the music video? Hilarity ensues.
Loudness war	Why recorded music is getting "louder" over time.
Manualism	The little-known art of playing music by squeezing air through the hands.
Marilyn Manson–Columbine High School massacre controversy	News media falsely accused Marilyn Manson and his band of the same name for influencing two mass shooters who actually hated his music.
Metal Open Air	Intended as Brazil's version of Wacken Open Air, it instead became their version of Fyre Festival.
"More Cowbell"	I got a fever, and the only prescription... is more cowbell!
"More popular than Jesus"	A remark that later proved deadly for John Lennon.
Mozart and scatology	Mozart was fond of toilet humour, his letters to friends and family often contained scatological passages. He even wrote music dedicated to scatology, which was shared among a closed group of most likely inebriated friends, the most infamous of which is Leck mich im Arsch (literally "Lick me in the arse").
Musikalisches Würfelspiel	A system written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in which the musical piece is decided randomly by playing dice.
"My Way" killings	You can get killed for singing Frank Sinatra's signature tune in the Philippines.
P-Funk mythology	The whimsical universe surrounding the P Funk all stars.
"Paul is dead"	Was Paul McCartney replaced by a lookalike in the 1960s?
Pink Floyd pigs	The band's recurring props and references.
PopMart Tour	Take an unfinished studio album, hold a press conference at Kmart, and put on a show in countries around the world, complete with a spinning mirrorball lemon, a giant martini olive, a large golden arch, and the largest video screen ever toured. That would be U2's 1997–98 tour in a nutshell.
Publius Enigma	A mystery wrapped in an enigma related to Pink Floyd, which has remained unsolved since it appeared on Usenet in 1994.
Operation Nifty Package	How do you get a dictator out of an embassy? With Music, of course!
Rockism and poptimism	What happens when pop music fans take themselves way too seriously? Actually, nothing fun.
Unusual types of gramophone records	From changing speeds, to endlessly-looping locked grooves, to... Bhutanese postage stamps?
"Up to eleven"	This article is one louder.
"Vestal Masturbation T-shirt"	A shirt released by the British heavy metal band Cradle of Filth depicting a masturbating nun on the front and calls Jesus Christ a cunt on the back. Multiple people have been arrested for wearing it out in public.
Whamageddon	A festive music challenge where you have to avoid listening to a certain Christmas song throughout the Christmas period. Perfect if you're not a fan of George Michael.

Instruments

Blackbird	A playable violin made out of black stone.
Cat organ	A keyboard instrument in which the keys cause cats to meow.
Electroencephalophone	A musical instrument controlled by brainwaves.
Escopetarra	The Colombian gun-guitar.
Great Stalacpipe Organ	Made in a cave using stalactites and a lot of patience and ingenuity.
Musical saw	The least favourite instrument of Ronnie Wood, the Hollies and the Screaming Trees.
Ugly stick	An instrument in Newfoundland, an insult everywhere else.
Viola jokes	You can tell if a viola player is playing out of tune if you can see the bow moving.

Genres

Chap hop	Rap music about being English in the 19th-century.
Chillwave	The term was invented to make fun of music journalists and bloggers who hype "the next big thing". Ironically, they then wrote about chillwave as "the next big thing".
Christian ska	Apparently, not even God himself can resist the raw power of ska.
Danger music	The name is very much literal, music that tries to harm the listener or performer.
Early Norwegian black metal scene	More church arsons per capita then any other known music scene!
Gothabilly	What if Buddy Holly was goth?
Grunge speak	That time a receptionist convinced The New York Times that "wack slacks" was slang for ripped jeans and "lamestain" meant an uncool person.
Kawaii metal	The cutest metal subgenre.
Lowercase	A genre of ultra-minimalist music that is known for deliberately utilizing silence to contrast with mundane field recordings which have been amplified in volume.
Pirate metal	Heavy metal music combined with pirate mythology and jargon.
Proibidão	As part of a crackdown on drug cartels in Rio de Janeiro, this uniquely Brazilian form of gangsta rap cannot legally be performed or broadcast on the radio.
Slutwave	From the same blog that brought you "chillwave".

Composers, musicians, and performers

AKB48 Group	Girl group or franchise? Same with her "official" rival group and "spin-off" group as well!
Y. Bhekhirst	A mysterious man with an implaceable accent hands over copies of his self-recorded cassette to random New York record stores in the 80s/90s, which contain a selection of strange, barely comprehensible songs set against sparse, repetitive instrumentation, later spawning a cult following among outsider music enthusiasts and a decades-long mystery.
Bis Kaidan	What happens when noise music meets J-pop?
Boston Typewriter Orchestra	Ah, the beautiful sound of... typewriters.
Rosemary Brown	A spiritualist who claimed that dead composers dictated new musical works to her.
Buckethead	A virtuoso electric guitarist known for always wearing a white mask and a KFC bucket on his head while performing and releasing over 300 albums over the course of over 30 years.
Bull of Heaven	A group that is known for their extremely long albums. Most known for 210: Like a Wall in Which An Insect Lives and Gnaws; at a runtime of 5.7 years; their longest album is 310: ΩΣPx0(2^18×5^18)pkk*k at 3.343 quindecillion years long.
GG Allin	A punk-rocker who would attack people attending his concerts, consisting of hoarse, disheveled vocals. He would also take an excessive amount of drugs, strip naked, and defecate on stage.
CD Rev	Because nothing says gangsta like being funded by a corrupt communist government.
Damião Experiença	An eccentric Brazilian singer-songwriter, known for being a reclusive hoarder and singing in his own made-up dialect of Portuguese (which he claimed was spoken on his "home planet"), often about self-contradictory and pro-authoritarian political themes and popular culture.
Matt Farley	A songwriter who has released thousands of songs under at least seventy pseudonyms such as "Papa Razzi and the Photogs", "The Hungry Food Band", and "The Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke and Pee"
The Gerogerigegege	A very special music project that released the sound of a man defecating and a record commemorating the deceased Japanese Emperor with the sound of people having sex to the national anthem, and had a member who just masturbated on stage.
Half Man Half Biscuit	Have you ever listened to "Man of Constant Sorrow (With a Garage in Constant Use)" from the album No-One Cares About Your Creative Hub So Get Your Fuckin' Hedge Cut?
Hanatarash	The Japanese noise band that drove a bulldozer into their concert venue.
Hatebeak	The thing that should not beak.
Hatari	A band that entered the 2019 Söngvakeppnin (Iceland's Eurovision Song Contest selection competition) as a joke, only to win first place. The band then finished third in Eurovision's semi-finals, advancing to the Grand Final and finishing 10th place there.
Joyce Hatto	A pianist who had many doctored recordings falsely attributed to her long after she stopped performing in public.
Bobby Jameson	A hippie singer-songwriter outcast who never received financial compensation for his songs and records. Thought to be dead after the 1960s, but then resurfaced with a blog in 2007 aiming to set the record straight about his life story.
Jandek	A prolific and pseudonymous singer/songwriter active since 1978 who only grants the occasional interview and has never provided any biographical information.
Florence Foster Jenkins	An American soprano famous for her singing ability or lack thereof.
Kevin MacLeod	Perhaps the most heard musician on the whole internet.
The KLF	An electronic band that became mainstream chart-toppers while undertaking confrontational Situationist-influenced performance stunts, culminating in them performing at the nationally-televised 1992 BRIT Awards with a grindcore band while firing machine gun blanks into the audience, dumping a dead sheep at the afterparty, and then disbanding.
Laibach	A Slovenian industrial band known for combining totalitarian aesthetics with pop culture, including martial covers of the Beatles and Queen. Also known as the first Western band to perform in North Korea.
Merzbow	A Japanese experimental music project whose most popular album has been affectionately described as "What a bug hears when it's being flushed down the toilet" and "Directly looking at the sun with your ears".
Moondog	A blind composer, theoretician, poet, and inventor of musical instruments who dressed like a viking and lived as a street musician in New York between the 1940s and 1970s.
MP4	Rock music and Members of Parliament do mix.
Okilly Dokilly	A band that performs metalcore songs about the character Ned Flanders from The Simpsons, while dressed as the character as well.
One Pound Fish Man	A man who works at a market who saw his sales patter go viral and challenge The X Factor for the Christmas number one single in 2012.
Eilert Pilarm	The Elvis impersonator who looks and sounds nothing like Elvis, according to Alfo Media.
Charles Manson discography	Wait, whose discography??
R. Stevie Moore	A one-man band who has self-released over 400 albums through his home-based mailing service since 1982. Later noted as a pioneer of DIY music and indie rock.
Portsmouth Sinfonia	An orchestra made up entirely of people with no experience in playing their respective assigned instruments.
Les Rallizes Dénudés	A pioneering Japanese experimental rock band, known for releasing virtually no studio material despite being active for around 30 years, their reclusive founder refusing nearly all interviews and media coverage, while nevertheless going on to be highly influential among Japan's avant-garde underground. This may or may not have been due to the fact the original bassist was involved in hijacking a domestic air flight, redirecting it towards North Korea.
The Residents	A long-running avant-garde music collective that perform wearing eyeball helmets and disguises, successfully maintaining their anonymity for around 50 years. One early rumor was that they were actually the Beatles.
The Shaggs	None of this band's members really wanted to form a band, nor did they really have any musical talent, but hey, a fortune teller predicted success, so off they went...
Thai Elephant Orchestra	An orchestra of elephants playing specially-designed instruments.
TISM	An (extremely) Australian rock band whose members are anonymous, perform wearing balaclavas and use pseudonyms like "Eugene de la Hot Croix Bun" and "Ron Hitler-Barassi". Known for their confrontational dark comedy, their song titles include "Defecate on My Face", "I Might Be A Cunt, But I'm Not A Fucking Cunt", "Martin Scorsese Is Really Quite A Jovial Fellow", "What Nationality Is Les Murray?", "Whatareya? (You're a Yob or You're a Wanker)" and "Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me".
Tonetta	A reclusive divorced man who gained a cult following in his sixties after posting videos to YouTube of his own lo-fi, independently made songs, often with sexually explicit lyrics coupled with footage of himself cross-dressing.
Tout-à-Coup Jazz	An African jazz band from the 1970s whose membership included two future Burkinabé leaders, Thomas Sankara and Blaise Compaoré, with the latter overthrowing the other in a 1987 coup. Unbelievably, the band's name was purely coincidental.
The Vegetable Orchestra	An Austrian orchestra whose musical instruments are made solely from vegetables.
Viper	Has released over 1,927 albums, though a majority contain recycled material. Titles of his work include You'll Cowards Don't Even Smoke Crack and Kill Urself My Man.
The Wealdstone Raider	A supporter of English non-league football team Wealdstone whose retorts towards rival supporters went viral and saw him challenging for the Christmas number one spot in 2014.
Wesley Willis	A musician and visual artist who recorded songs about topics such as his home town of Chicago, his schizophrenia, violent confrontations with cartoon superheroes, and bestiality, was fond of headbutting fans, and often ended his songs with "Rock over London, rock on, Chicago" followed by a product slogan.
Gary Wilson	An experimental musician who sings about stalking girls and plays with duct tape, fake blood, powder, and mannequins when on stage.
Wild Man Fischer	A schizophrenic Los Angeles street entertainer whose big break was recording an album with Frank Zappa. Their collaborations ended when Fischer, in a violent rage, threw a bottle that nearly hit Zappa's daughter Moon.
Ya Ho Wha 13	A cult psychedelic rock band... literally.
The Zimmers	A rock band made up of elderly musicians. As of 2017^[update], the oldest member had lived to 101.
The Zombeatles	Paul is undead.

Musical works

A Musical Joke	A composition that Mozart allegedly made to mock bad composers.
As Slow as Possible	A piece of music by John Cage to be performed until 2640.
"Carnival of Light"	The Holy Grail for Beatles fans: an 11-minute recording of the Fab Four aimlessly bashing their instruments and shouting gibberish.
Cat fugue	A piece for harpsichord allegedly inspired by the sounds the composer's cat produced by walking along the instruments keyboard.
Duetto buffo di due gatti	A duet in which two sopranos repeatedly meow at each other.
Grosse Fuge	A composition written by Ludwig van Beethoven which was universally put down at the time as being "incomprehensible", now accepted as one of his greatest works.
Helikopter-Streichquartett	A string quartet composition by Karlheinz Stockhausen that must be played in four circling helicopters, the sound remixed, chopper sounds and all, for an audience on the ground.
*Homage to Hans Keller*	A piece for four tubas by Anthony Burgess written immediately after Keller reviewed the operetta Blooms of Dublin as a "pathetic pastiche". Roger Lewis called it "a kind of lavatorial blast".
"Leck mich im Arsch"	A canon, whose title translates as "Lick Me in the Arse", by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Leck mir den Arsch fein recht schön sauber's lyrics were also written by him. Similar text is hidden in Difficile lectu disguised as Latin.
List of musical works in unusual time signatures	What's the most absurd time signature you can imagine? 1/12? ⅔/2? How about 3²/₂/4?
List of silent musical compositions	Not to be confused with "The Sound of Silence", these tunes don't have really much to hear. Among them is one of the most famous classical compositions of the 20th century.
List of music considered the worst	We built this city on not being very good.
Rage Over a Lost Penny	An audience favorite from Beethoven's oeuvre. It's gleefully angry, but the maestro left it unfinished.

Songs

"The Anacreontic Song"	An 18th-century drinking song whose melody was later adopted for "The Star-Spangled Banner".
"Boris Johnson Is a Fucking Cunt"	A foul-mouthed comedy punk song about the British Prime Minister that attempted to be the UK Christmas number one in 2020. Despite getting no air time, it got to No. 5. The following year, it spawned a sequel, which also got to No. 5 in the Christmas chart. From the same band that brought you "Prince Andrew Is a Sweaty Nonce" and "Fuck the Tories".
"Camouflage"	A vinyl single from 1983 that contained a computer programme for the song's own music video for the ZX81. Created by a man who later found fame wearing a papier-mâché head.
"Eat Your Salad"	The Latvian entry of the Eurovision Song Contest 2022. The lyrics speak of "eating veggies and p*ssy", along with numerous other sexual innuendos. Somehow, the song still has a serious message.
"Euro-Vision"	The Belgian entry of the Eurovision Song Contest 1980 whose lyrics spoke precisely of the event in which they took part.
"Five Per Cent for Nothing"	A very short instrumental by a band noted for very long songs that was retitled as a parting shot at their former manager, who sued them afterwards.
"Flappie"	A Dutch Christmas song about cannibalism.
"Give That Wolf a Banana"	A song that combines Little Red Riding Hood and two crazy 4.5 billion year old yellow wolves called Keith and Jim. The meaning of the song is debated, but one common theory is of all things, vaccines. It's also a Eurovision song, to boot.
"Gloomy Sunday"	A Hungarian dirge from the 1930s that the press of the time claimed was linked to over 100 suicides, earning it the moniker of the "Hungarian Suicide Song".
"Hitler Has Only Got One Ball"	Was der Führer only half a man?
"Jeg har set en rigtig negermand"	A Danish #1 single from 1970, extolling the virtues of racial equality while calling a "negro man" "black as a bucket of tar".
"Jiggle Jiggle"	That time when an autotuned interview with Louis Theroux became so popular they convinced him to do a song.
"Lemon Incest"	Fun for the whole family!.....NOT!
"Lift Yourself"	Poopy-di scoop. Scoop-diddy-whoop. Whoop-di-scoop-di-poop.
"The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet"	The name says it all. (Well, almost.)
"The Most Unwanted Song"	Featuring operatic rapping, a children's choir urging listeners to go to Wal-Mart, bagpipes, cowboy music, and political slogans shouted through a bullhorn.
"Never Learn Not to Love"	The Beach Boys' collaboration with Charles Manson. (Yes, that Charles Manson.)
"Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah"	If you can see someone's underwear, here's the tune to tell them by.
"Planet of the Bass"	The 2023 affectionate parody of 1990s Europop that became a hit in its own right.
"Prisencolinensinainciusol"	The song where the lyrics are deliberately unintelligible gibberish intended to sound to its Italian audience as if it is sung in English spoken with an American accent.
"Ram Ranch"	A spoken-word heavy metal song about a gay cowboy orgy that became an internet meme and a counter-protest song against the Canadian convoy protest.
"Ready 'n' Steady"	A song mentioned in a top songs list of a notable magazine, that was long-believed by some to be non-existent because collectors were unable to find a recording or further information on it until 33 years after it was written.
"Rocket Queen"	If you want to hear the sound of a woman having sex with Axl Rose set to music, now's your chance!
"Supermarioland"	Rapping set to the theme of Super Mario Land. After hearing the song, Nintendo not only cleared the sample but also requested they make an album of Super Mario material.
"Tetris"	A Eurodance version of the Tetris theme co-produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It was in the British charts at the same time as "Supermarioland" mentioned above.
"There's No One as Irish as Barack O'Bama"	A 2008 song celebrating the Irish heritage of then-candidate for President of the United States Barack Obama.
"Timothy"	A top 40 hit in 1970, written by Rupert Holmes of "The Piña Colada Song" fame, that gained success despite (or due to) the fact it was about cannibalism during a mining disaster.
"To Be or Not to Be (The Hitler Rap)"	A comic rap performed by Mel Brooks, sung as Adolf Hitler. "Don't be stupid, be a smarty. Come and join the Nazi Party".
"To Me, To You (Bruv)"	An unexpected collaboration between rapper Tinchy Stryder and British comedy duo the Chuckle Brothers.
"United Breaks Guitars"	A protest song against United Airlines which caused their stock price to fall by 10% and cost shareholders $180 million.
"We Didn't Start the Fire"	A song covering the major events of 40 years. Check Events mentioned for explanations of each.
"You Suffer"	At a full 1.316 seconds in length, the shortest song with a physical single release of all time.
"You're Pitiful"	The true story of how a Weird Al Yankovic parody caused the article for Atlantic Records to be regularly vandalized.

Albums

A Rubber Band Christmas	An album of Christmas music created using office supplies.
Amore	A Japan-exclusive city pop album from the granddaughter of former Italian fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini.
All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling	An early album by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, which had a tiny release and was impossibly rare until a 2022 release.
The Boy Bands Have Won	Actually, this album's full title is "The Boy Bands Have Won" followed by a further 151 words. As of August 2009, it holds the record for the longest album title.
Christmas in the Stars	Jon Bon Jovi's recorded music debut was for a Star Wars-themed holiday album.
Cigarettes and Valentines	An entire record by Green Day whose master tracks were stolen. This led to the creation of American Idiot.
Crítica da Faculdade do Cu	Portuguese for "Critique of the Power of the Ass". See also O Rei do Cu (The King of Ass).
Dark Night of the Soul	Due to a legal dispute, this album was released with a blank CD-R.
Eat Shit You Fucking Redneck	Pigface doesn't like rednecks so much.
Elvis' Greatest Shit	Not the one he was trying to pass the night he allegedly died.
Embrace (American band Embrace album) Embrace (English band Embrace album)	What happens to Wikipedia article titles when two different bands with the exact same name both release self-titled albums.
Everywhere at the End of Time	A 61⁄2 hour concept album series portraying the stages of mental deterioration caused by Alzheimer's disease. Sounds obscure? It became popular in the most unexpected of places.
Everyday Chemistry	A supposed album by the Beatles, from an alternate dimension where they never broke up.
The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks	They do indeed.
Having Fun with Elvis on Stage	An official Elvis Presley live album that has no music, instead consisting of random on-stage banter and comments from between songs stripped of any coherence or context.
In Search of The	A box set isn't particularly unusual. A box set of 13 full albums that have never been released before, handmade by the artist, is pretty unusual.
The Lillywhite Sessions	Never officially released, and yet fans and critics can argue that it's the best "album" by the Dave Matthews Band.
Metal Machine Music	A 1975 album by Lou Reed that consists of 64 minutes of audio feedback, widely believed to have either been an elaborate joke, or an attempt by Reed to escape from a record label contract.
The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief	A three-sided LP.
Musique pour Supermarché	This album by Jean-Michel Jarre had only a single copy produced, which was then auctioned off like a painting. The master tapes were subsequently destroyed, making the copy unique.
Once Upon a Time in Shaolin	A Wu-Tang Clan album that only had one copy produced, being bought by Martin Shkreli for two million dollars, making it the most expensive work of music ever sold.
Orgasm	How a bunch of tripped-out hippies in 1969 decided to invite random people from the streets of New York to contribute to their experimental album, and in the process ended up inventing industrial music, noise rock and perhaps even black metal decades ahead of schedule.
Sleep	An 81⁄2 hour concept album about sleep. Also available in a one-hour version if you're in a hurry.
Sleepify	Silence is golden, especially when you're trying to fund a world tour.
Smile	An unfinished Beach Boys album that is one of the most written-about and speculated-upon works in popular music history.
Sweet Insanity	A rejected Brian Wilson album that was written and recorded with his ex-psychologist. Includes a rap song that opens with the line, "My name is Brian and I'm the man, I write hit songs with the wave of my hand!" Wilson's fans threatened to murder a critic for publishing a positive review.
Trout Mask Replica	A chaotic 1969 album by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band containing bizarre and disjointed musical compositions.
Wake Up!	A rock album officially sanctioned by the Pope.

Film

3 Dev Adam	A Turkish movie featuring (unlicensed) Captain America and El Santo battling evil Spider-Man. Quite successful in Turkey, resulting in other unlicensed films such as the infamous Turkish Star Wars.
100 Years	A movie that your grandchildren and great-grandchildren might be able to enjoy!
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn	A movie about a director who makes a bad movie, but can't remove his name from the credits because his real name is Alan Smithee. In reality, the movie about the movie was so bad that director Arthur Hiller was credited as Alan Smithee to disguise himself from the production.
Ambiancé	An experimental film that was scheduled to have a thirty day-long running time, with the only copy being destroyed after its premiere, only for it to be unexpectedly cancelled by the director after its release date passed without a showing.
Barbenheimer	The biggest movie phenomenon of 2023, where Malibu meets the Manhattan Project.
Big Dumb Object	A mysterious object (usually of extraterrestrial origin) in a film that is there simply to cause a sense of wonder.
Black and white hat symbolism in film	The hat, sir, whatever could it mean?
William Castle	Horror director who loved a promotional gimmick. One film offered a $1000 insurance policy if you died of fright, and another offered audiences a full refund if they were too scared to see the ending.
The Cure for Insomnia	A movie that runs for 85 hours. Not the longest movie ever screened though (see below).
The Day the Clown Cried	A notorious unreleased film about the Holocaust by Jerry Lewis – hey, it's a comedy!
Deafula	A vampire movie shot entirely in American Sign Language.
Death of a President	A mockumentary film created about the hypothetical future assassination of George W. Bush, released while he was still in office.
Dump months	The opposite of the summer movie season.
Empire	A film by Andy Warhol consisting entirely of eight hours of still footage of the Empire State Building.
Empires of the Deep	A $140 million unreleased US-Chinese aqua-fantasy film that sunk to the depths of the sea...
First on the Moon	Proof that the Soviets got there, thirty years before Armstrong and Aldrin didn't.
I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I Have a Three-Picture Deal at Disney	"I knew I wanted to be a director, and I did a couple of short films, and this is the only one that haunts me." —Ben Affleck, Academy Award winner
In the Aftermath	A B-movie studio gets the rights to a surrealist anime and re-edits it into a post-apocalyptic thriller.
Italian Spiderman	An Australian production made with the goal of being a tribute to old Italian action films.
Lee Kin-yan	A Hong Kong actor repeatedly cast in Stephen Chow films as a nose-picking, bearded transvestite.
List of films featuring giant monsters	You are never safe in Tokyo.
List of films that most frequently use the word fuck	Golly!
Logistics	The world's longest movie ever made, it follows the entire five-week process of making and selling a pedometer in reverse chronological order.
The Longest Most Meaningless Movie in the World	A movie that runs for 48 hours. Despite its title, it isn't the world's longest movie, but the jury's still out on whether it's the most meaningless....
Maidstone	A film notable for a real, bloody fight between its director and its star actor that was kept in the final edit.
Manic Pixie Dream Girl	A female stock character in (usually) movies who is extremely eccentric and girlish, and serves mainly to motivate and/or provide character development for the male protagonist.
Manos: The Hands of Fate	A low-budget film created by a fertilizer salesman from Texas, which is often considered to be the worst film of all time.
Mockbuster	Not the movie you want, but the bargain-bin equivalent.
Modern Times Forever (Stora Enso Building, Helsinki)	The second longest film ever shot: ten whole days of one decaying building Life After People-style and first screened in front of itself. The directors have a point.
Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead	Part 2 has the longest film title in the English language.
Oscar bait	There are certain rules one follows when making an Oscar film. Including mental illness, the Holocaust and Meryl Streep in your film also helps.
On the Art of the Cinema	North Korean cinema is best Korean cinema.
Paint Drying	Created to test the patience of the British Board of Film Classification.
Patterson–Gimlin film	Bigfoot's most famous appearance.
Pink Flamingos	A cult 1972 film following "the filthiest person alive", notorious for its deliberately disgusting content and culminating in to protagonist eating dog feces.
Plan 9 from Outer Space	The epitome of so-bad-it's-good cinema, and Bela Lugosi's last film. Starring posthumously, Lugosi died before production began.
Pulgasari Shin Sang-ok	An anti-feudal Godzilla-esque film, supposedly an allegory for unchecked capitalism, produced by Kim Jong-il, and directed by a South Korean filmmaker who Kim had ordered to be kidnapped along with his wife so that they could make films for the North.
Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa	An all-star cast appear in this badly written, badly animated picture. The producer apparently gave the animators $500,000 and didn't check their work until he saw it on television.
Raza	A drama about a family's roles in the Spanish Civil War that was written and supposingly ghost-directed by Francisco Franco himself. Takes "history is written by the victors" to a new level.
Return of the Ewok	One of the rare cases of lost media within the Star Wars franchise.
Roar	Back in the 1970s, a family of African wildlife activists gathered together to make a movie with over 150 untrained big cats, leading to seventy members of the cast and crew getting injured. Its genre? A comedy, of course!
The Room Tommy Wiseau	Perhaps the worst film ever created, filled with bad acting, poor dialogue, scenes that go nowhere, crazy behind-the-scenes, and more. And, of course, the man behind it all.
Roundhay Garden Scene	The first ever moving picture, which lasted for an epic two seconds.
Self-Portrait	An experimental film by Yoko Ono, featuring a 42-minute shot of John Lennon's half-erect penis. A later Lennon/Ono collaboration called Erection is surprisingly unrelated.
Shaken, not stirred	Why 007 prefers his martini shaken.
Sharknado	Exactly what it implies: Sharks + Tornado = the best damn disaster movie on earth. You better know it's got an ungodly amount of sequels and a cult following too!
Shin Sang-ok	A South Korean movie director who was kidnapped by the North Korean government, alongside his former wife, in order to make movies for then-Minister of Cultural Affairs Kim Jong Il.
Smell-O-Vision	A system designed to enhance films with odors. Used once for the 1960 film Scent of Mystery and never again.
Stay Puft Marshmallow Man	"I tried to think of the most harmless thing. Something I loved from my childhood. Something that could never ever possibly destroy us!"
Stinking badges	Something nobody needs. Possibly the most frequently quoted and misquoted line from a movie ever.
Taylor Mead's Ass	An Andy Warhol film consisting of a single prolonged shot of exactly what the title says.
Twin films	When two studios make the same idea at the same time.
The Uranus Experiment	An unusually high-concept porn film that contains a real scene of sex in zero-gravity and was nominated for a Nebula science fiction award as an act of protest by a group of disgruntled authors.
United Passions	A $30 million film sponsored by FIFA about how great they are. Came out right after the 2015 FIFA corruption case came to light. One of the lowest grossing sports movies of all time.
Unsimulated sex	When two actors really have sex for a scene, rather than a simulation.
Who Killed Captain Alex?	A 2010 Ugandan action-comedy film produced on a budget of $85.
Wilhelm scream	A stock sound effect first recorded in 1951 and used in dozens of films (including seven Star Wars films, two Lord of the Rings films and Kill Bill).
Zyzzyx Road	Budget: $1.2 million. Box office: 30 bucks. It makes sense in context.

Television

Al Murray's Compete for the Meat	A British game show where the top prize is a frozen chicken and the second prize is some sausages.
Alternative 3	An April Fools joke by an ITV science show leads many to believe that scientists were being kidnapped to prepare for the colonization of Mars.
Anti-Barney humor	An article for all Barney & Friends haters.
Australia's Naughtiest Home Videos	Forget Turn-On – this never even made it to the end of its only episode.
Bernd das Brot	The mascot of a German children's television network: a chronically depressed loaf of bread who laments his life and enjoys very boring activities.
The Canadian Conspiracy	A mockumentary released in 1985 that asserts that Canada is subverting the United States by taking over its media.
Conspiracy 58	A mockumentary that claimed that the 1958 World Cup was never actually held. Despite being revealed as a hoax at the end, people still believed it.
"Dennō Senshi Porygon"	An episode of the "harmless" Pokémon cartoon that caused seizures in almost 700 children.
Dinner for One	A classic British comedy sketch, virtually unknown in its homeland, that has become the most-repeated television programme in German history.
Don't Scare the Hare	A British television game show involving a large robotic hare and an underground forest. It was not popular and lasted only one season.
Flanderization	When a TV character becomes a literal caricature of their initial form.
Flemish Secession hoax	Our regular programming is now interrupted to declare independence from Belgium.
Friday night death slot	Where TV shows go to die.
Mikhail Gorbachev Pizza Hut commercial	The real former leader of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev starred in a Pizza Hut commercial. What more can I say?
Graggle Simpson	What do you mean, "who"? You know him! He's your favorite Simpsons character!
Guy Goma BBC interview	A man who went to the BBC for a job interview is instead interviewed on its news channel about the Apple Corps v. Apple Computer lawsuit.
Heil Honey I'm Home!	Hitler has his own sitcom, with his Jewish neighbors.
Historiography of The Simpsons	An in-depth analysis of whether, when and why people stopped finding The Simpsons funny.
History of Pop	How a TV program guide became an actual channel.
*"Hold on Tight!" (Inside No. 9)*	An entirely fake episode of the dark comedy anthology series Inside No. 9, featuring mocked-up photos and clips for a trailer, designed to trick the show's viewers.
"How to Eat with Your Butt"	The plot and the title of this South Park episode are pretty strange.
*Hypothetical*	The only quiz containing only hypothetical questions, such as: "You must steal Russell Crowe's shower gel. How do you do it?", "How much money do you have to paid to eat a packet of crisps every time you have a conversation with someone for a year?", and the stone-cold original: "Big hat or small hat?"
I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant	A documentary series on TLC. You can probably guess the plot.
It's So Funny	A North Korean comedy show which is anything but funny.
I Wanna Marry "Harry"	An American reality show to find "Prince Harry" (really an actor they tried to pass off as him) a wife. Meghan Markle was not a contestant.
John Dillermand	A Danish children's series featuring a man in a red-and-white costume, which extends to his elongated penis, that he gets into all sorts of (family friendly) trouble with!
Judaism in Rugrats	A Maccababy's gotta do what a Maccababy's gotta do.
Jumping the shark	Metaphor, based on something that Fonzie actually did on an episode of Happy Days, for the moments when popular TV series lose all credibility and have undeniably entered their twilight years.
K Foundation Burn a Million Quid	Why did the K Foundation burn a million pounds in cash?
Michael Larson	A man who won over US$100,000 in an American quiz show because he was able to notice a pattern in the flashing lights on the "Big Board."
*List of Saturday Night Live* incidents**	From Ashlee Simpson's lip-sync fail to Adrien Brody's possibly racist introduction to Sean Paul.
Lucky 7	The first pirate television station in the United States, which featured such movies as Rocky and Behind the Green Door.
Max Headroom signal hijacking	TV signals in Chicago are twice overpowered on 22 November 1987 by broadcasts featuring a person (possibly a male) disguised as the 1980s virtual TV character Max Headroom. The source of the broadcasts and the people involved remain unknown.
Odagiri effect	Turns out that women find sexy men on TV shows quite appealing.
Greg Packer	A man on the street, no matter which street you're talking about.
Shaun Micallef's Mad as Hell	What's wrong Shaun? Why must you be mad as hell?
Will Smith–Chris Rock slapping incident	What happens when a G.I. Jane joke goes horribly wrong. At an awards ceremony. On worldwide television.
Soap opera rapid aging syndrome	A tragic condition suffered by some young characters on soap operas.
Southern Television broadcast interruption	A news program in England interrupted by an interstellar message from Vrillon, representative of the mighty Ashtar Galactic Command.
Spaghetti-tree hoax	Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.
Star Wars Holiday Special	What do you get when you combine Star Wars and Christmas? One of the worst films of all time.
Superstar USA	A music competition looking for the worst singers America has to offer.
Tomorrow's Pioneers	A Palestinian children's show produced by Hamas and co-hosted by various costumed characters, including one resembling Mickey Mouse. Most of said costumed characters are killed by Jews in some violent manner.
Turn-On	An ABC comedy series that was cancelled even before the first episode had finished.
Turner Doomsday Video	When he founded CNN, Ted Turner made sure they would be ready for the end of the world.
TV pickup	Britons regularly cause massive power surges by simultaneously making tea during program breaks.
Uh Oh!	90's Canadian children's game show, with an energetic wacky host, fun trivia questions, and a leather daddy dumping slime on kids! What could go wrong!
Very special episode	A genre of television episodes with controversial life lessons interweaved into the storyline, popularized by Blossom.
Wank Week	A Channel 4 project for all those who think there aren't enough jerks on TV.
Tommy Westphall	How an autistic child and Detective Munch, are responsible for more than 200 TV series.
Who's Your Daddy?	To win $100,000, adoptees have to pick their biological father out of 25 men.
Zuiikin' English	A Japanese TV series from 1992 which combined gymnastic exercises with the teaching of "useful" English language phrases, such as "Spare me my life!", "I am allergic to penicillin", "I have a bad case of diarrhea" and "Lovely golf weather today!"

Video games

Action 52	Inspired by Taiwanese NES multicarts, one businessman sets to create an all-American version with original games... but leaves the devs only 3 months to create 52 of them, resulting in disaster. Also, a tie-in comic book for a franchise that never got started, and a contest where the game is so bugged you can't even enter it.
The Adventures of Ninja Nanny & Sherrloch Sheltie	An "educational" PC game from 1993 that became notorious decades later for being built upon random public domain media strewn together in a wildly nonsensical fashion, complete with animation, audio clips, hyperlinked text, and some sort of plot.
Atari video game burial	Are your video games not selling? Why not do what Atari did and bury them in a New Mexico landfill?
Bad Rats	A physics-based puzzle game about rats killing cats. It was so bad it became a viral gag gift and got a sequel.
Bartle taxonomy of player types	What type of gamer are you?
Battle of B-R5RB	A player-versus-player battle in Eve Online which involved over 7,500 players, lasted 21 hours, and cost over $300,000 worth of in-game currency.
Beat 'Em & Eat 'Em	An early "erotic" game for the Atari 2600 where you control two women walking from side to side trying to catch semen from a man who masturbating from a rooftop for some reason.
Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing	A racing game considered one of the worst of all time with Metacritic's worst-ever score of 8/100. It has opponents that don't move, the ability to drive through buildings and accelerate infinitely in reverse, and a notorious "YOU'RE WINNER !" [sic] message after each race.
Bob's Game	An unreleased homebrew game of a game, in a game, within a game. The developer went on a protest against the evil corporation known as "Gantendo".
Boong-Ga Boong-Ga	The first arcade game about shoving a giant finger up someone's anus.
Boss key	A special key or key combination used in computer games to quickly hide the game from superiors or coworkers.
Breast physics	Follow the bouncing boobs!
Cadillacs and Dinosaurs: The Second Cataclysm	A sequel in name only to a classic beat 'em up, based on an unrelated comic book that predates the first game, and programmed by none other than Elon Musk.
Calculator	The best video game ever: A $10 software calculator.
Cat hair mustache puzzle	Considered among the worst puzzles of any video game.
Catechumen	Hallelujah! Shoot possessed Roman soldiers with a magical sword until they turn Christian and start to pray.
Cho Aniki	A long-running series of games from Japan, known for their absurdist humor and homoeroticism, about the quest of sweaty bodybuilders for protein supplements.
Code: Realize	A series of dating sims featuring Victor Frankenstein and "Herlock Sholmes" among the player character's potential suitors.
Communist Mutants from Space	A Cold War Space Invaders clone in which you do battle with the Mother Creature, driven mad by radioactive vodka.
Corrupted Blood incident	An unintentional virtual epidemic in World of Warcraft, which became an important medical case study.
Cubic Ninja	A game that ended up being resold for over $500 due to its unintentional ability to let a 3DS run homebrew.
Dance Dance Immolation	It's exactly like Dance Dance Revolution, just with flamethrowers pointed at you.
Development of Duke Nukem Forever	A game that began its production in 1997 and was only released in 2011. With four changes of engines, lawsuits, and profanity responses to company executives, with the end result being critically panned, it's gonna be hard for you to find a more complicated story on Wikipedia than this one.
Dies irae	An eroge (pornographic) visual novel, revolving around a cabal of magic interdimensional Nazis attacking a Japanese town on Christmas of 2006. Notably ported to Nintendo Switch.
Don't Buy This	A rare example of truth in advertising.
Edge Games	A company that decided that the "Edge" in their name was so important that it started to sue everything video game-related using that word. Until Electronic Arts got involved.
Eggplant run	A challenge playthrough of Spelunky in which you carry an eggplant and toss it into the final boss's face
Ethnic Cleansing	Perhaps the most racist video game ever made.
Fortnite Holocaust Museum	A virtual museum on the victims of the Holocaust created in... Fortnite.