Fun fact: Forget sharks and snakes, mosquitoes kill more humans than any other animal every year. Maybe that wasn't so fun ...
A fun fact is a tidbit of interesting or entertaining trivia. People often introduce a fun fact, sometimes in the form of witty and biting observations, with the phrase itself because otherwise how would you know it was a fun fact.
Though school kids might think of f
un and fact as natural enemies, the two have appeared together since the nineteenth century. In the 1850s, there was a newspaper column titled “Fun, Fact, and Fancy,” a sort of Twitter Moments of its day. By 1860, there was an entire paper titled Fun, Fact, and Fancy dedicated to these accounts.
The current use of fun fact for a little nugget of knowledge comes about by the 1970s. Wrigley used fun facts in newspaper ads for its chewing gum. The first couple facts in each ad were proper fun facts, while the last, once they had your attention, was a fact about Wrigley gum. A number of these fun facts were collected in a 1973 book. A few years later fun facts made their way into the classroom, when a professional magazine for teachers proposed an activity where students come up with their own fun facts.
On his Late Show, David Letterman featured a recurring segment called Fun Facts. It starting with “facts” throwing shade on fellow TV host Phil Donahue and later branched out to general topics. Letterman’s fun facts were often made-up and absurd. A collection of them was printed in a book in 2008.