#culture

Leonardo da Vinci spent 12 years painting the lips of the Mona Lisa.

Vincent van Gogh only sold one painting during his lifetime, yet he completed over 900 works.

The oldest recorded 'art' is a shell with a zigzag engraving dating back 540,000 years.

Claude Monet destroyed up to 500 of his own paintings in fits of frustration.

The first documented use of the term 'artificial intelligence' was in a 1956 conference at Dartmouth College which has since influenced creative digital art developments.

The famous melting clocks in Salvador Dalí's 'The Persistence of Memory' were inspired by Camembert cheese melting in the sun.

The word 'cartoon' originally referred to preparatory sketches for fine art, rather than the animations we know today.

Artists Piet Mondrian and Snoop Dogg share the same birthday, March 7th.

The word 'alphabet' comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha and beta.

The longest English word without a vowel is 'rhythms'.

The word 'bookkeeper' (and its variations) is the only unhyphenated English word with three consecutive double letters.

'E' is the most frequently used letter in the English language.

The word 'uncopyrightable' is the longest English word that can be written without repeating any letter.

The English language contains more synonyms than any other language.

The word 'run' has over 645 different meanings in the Oxford English Dictionary, making it the word with the most definitions.

The dot over the letter 'i' is called a 'tittle'.

The word 'queue' is pronounced the same even if the last four letters are removed.

The Great Pyramid of Giza was the tallest man-made structure in the world for over 3,800 years until the Lincoln Cathedral was built in 1311 AD.

The city of Rome has a history that spans over 2,500 years, making it one of the oldest continuously occupied cities in Europe.

The ancient Sumerians in Mesopotamia are credited with inventing the first form of writing, called cuneiform, around 3200 BC.

Cleopatra VII of Egypt was not ethnically Egyptian; she was a descendant of Ptolemy I, a Greek general under Alexander the Great.

The earliest known form of democracy was established in Athens around 508 BC, allowing male citizens to vote on legislation and executive bills.

The ancient Indus Valley Civilization, which thrived around 2500 BC, had advanced urban planning, including grid layouts and sophisticated drainage systems.

Hannibal famously crossed the Alps with war elephants to attack Rome during the Second Punic War around 218 BC.

The oldest known recipe, dating back to around 1750 BC, is a set of instructions for brewing beer found on an ancient Sumerian cuneiform tablet.

Contrary to popular belief, the Great Wall of China is not visible from the moon with the naked eye.

The shortest complete sentence in the English language is 'I am.'

The word 'set' has the highest number of different meanings in the English language, with over 400 senses listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The longest word in the English language published in a dictionary is 'pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis,' a type of lung disease.

The dot over the letters 'i' and 'j' is known as a 'tittle.'

The word 'uncopyrightable' is one of the longest words that can be typed using only the top row of a QWERTY keyboard.

The fear of long words is ironically called 'hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.'

The word 'bookkeeper' (and its variants) is the only unhyphenated English word with three consecutive double letters.

The English language contains only two common words that end with '-gry': 'angry' and 'hungry.'

The most common letter in the English language is 'e.'

The word 'queue' is the only word that sounds the same when the last four letters are removed.