Trivia Tuesday

1. Author Eric Blair wrote under what pen name?
2. Which Aldous Huxley work was the inspiration behind Jim Morrison naming his band The Doors?
3. Which classic novel was written based on a bet between several authors vacationing together in 1818?
4. Which piece of American literature containing over 50,000 words does not once use the letter “e”?
5. Which word in the English language has the most definitions?

Last Week's Answers

What is the best selling book of all time?

The Bible is the best selling book of all time with approximately six billion books sold. The second-best selling book is Quotations from the Works of Mao Tse-Tung with about 800 million sales.

The average person uses a vocabulary of approximately 8,000 words. How many did Shakespeare use?

Shakespeare used a vocabulary of 29,066 different words.

As far as number of lines is concerned, which is the most demanding of Shakespeare’s roles?

Hamlet is the most demanding of Shakespeare’s roles with 1,422 lines or roughly 36% of the total number of spoken lines in the play. Hamlet’s role is made up of 11,610 words. The character Falstaff has the most lines of any character in all of Shakespeare’s plays combined with 1,614 spoken lines in three different plays: Henry IV, Part I; Henry IV, Part II; and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Which English author, poet, essayist, literary critic, and playwright enjoyed taking off his clothes and climbing mulberry trees?

D. H. Lawrence enjoyed taking off his clothes and climbing mulberry trees.

All of the proceeds from which book were bequeathed to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London?

The Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children was the recipient of the rights to Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, given to the hospital by author J. M. Barrie, which has provided the hospital with substantial financial support since 1929. When the copyright originally expired in 1987, 50 years after Barrie's death, the UK government granted the hospital a perpetual right to collect royalties on the work.

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