The "Yongle dadian," an encyclopedia of the Chinese Ming dynasty, had 22,937 chapters in 10,000 volumes. Over 2,000 Chinese scholars worked on the book for 5 years before it was finished.

In India it is perfectly proper for men to wear pajamas in public. Pajamas are accepted as standard daytime wearing apparel.

While Theodore Roosevelt was campaigning in Milwaukee in 1912, a would-be assassin fired a bullet into the right side of his chest. Much of the force of the slug was absorbed by the President's eyeglasses case and by the ...Read More

The Louisville Slugger logo doesn't always appear just on baseball bats. One of the more recent adaptations of the familiar oval was on the first cruise missile fired in the Persian Gulf war. The missile was painted by ...Read More

Hold it over your head. The British call a large umbrella, especially one that is bulky or awkwardly wrapped, a "gamp." It is in allusion to the umbrella of Mrs. Gamp in Charles Dickens' work Martin Chuzzlewit.

Toward the end of the fifteenth century, men's shoes had a square tip, like a duck's beak, a fashion launched by Charles VIII of France to hide the imperfection of one of his feet, which had six toes.