› added 7 years ago

129

TIL it took 49 years to publish the first authoritative English dictionary. It took five years to publish the first part, A to Ant.

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via reddit.com

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Z81LG TIL thanks to an erroneous description of a US Customs flag in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter", since the 1870s there's been a popular conspiracy theory that the USA has an official alternative flag, the "Civil Flag", with vertical stripes.
J1ra1 TIL that "On December 20, 1836, temperatures [in Illinois] fell 40 °F or 22.2 °C in minutes, which supposedly froze people to their saddles and chickens in their tracks."
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