r/todayilearned • u/Neil118781 • 46m ago

TIL that at military school, Napoleon had a bitter classmate named Phélippeaux whom he constantly traded insults and fistfights with. 15 years later, Phélippeaux masterminded the defense at the Siege of Acre, dealing Napoleon the first major defeat of his military career.

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

88 comments

r/todayilearned • u/haddock420 • 10h ago

TIL Adam DeVine was hit by a cement truck at age 11, breaking every bone in his legs. He spent two weeks in a coma, underwent 26 surgeries, and used a wheelchair during recovery. Today, he supports Children's Miracle Network Hospitals and regularly visits children in hospital.

en.wikipedia.org

37.6k Upvotes

468 comments

r/todayilearned • u/carboncopy95437 • 10h ago

TIL that when serial killer Ted Bundy was just 3 years old, his 15-year-old aunt awoke from a nap to find kitchen knives arranged around her bed, with young Bundy standing beside her, smiling.

en.wikipedia.org

6.6k Upvotes

579 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Mr-Thuun • 7h ago

TIL That Saint Lucia is the only country in the world named after a historical woman.

worldatlas.com

3.3k Upvotes

222 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Infamous-Skippy • 7h ago

TIL the guy behind modern Breatharianism, the belief that you can survive off of only sunlight, air, and dust, was busted eating McDonald’s, and defended this by saying "All McDonalds are constructed on properties that are protected by 5th Dimensional high energy/spiritual portals."

en.wikipedia.org

3.2k Upvotes

171 comments

r/todayilearned • u/No_Idea_Guy • 14h ago

TIL in 1937 a woman boarded an empty Paris Metro carriage and was found stabbed to death less than 90 seconds later at the next stop. No one else was seen enter or leave the carriage. The victim had been working as a spy. Neither the murderer nor the method of escape was ever discovered.

en.wikipedia.org

7.6k Upvotes

193 comments

r/todayilearned • u/carboncopy95437 • 13h ago

TIL in 1939, 1000’s of children were evacuated from London to the English countryside to escape Nazi bombing. Three girls stayed at the Oxford home of author C.S. Lewis and helped inspire his classic novel The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in which children are evacuated to a country house.

en.wikipedia.org

3.0k Upvotes

97 comments

r/todayilearned • u/RedditIsAGranfaloon • 11h ago

TIL Monty Python's John Cleese’s family name was originally Cheese, but his father changed it from Cheese to Cleese to avoid being teased when he signed up to fight in World War I.

bbcamerica.com

1.5k Upvotes

82 comments

r/todayilearned • u/silencer_OO • 4h ago

TIL archaeologists discovered a rat’s nest inside a wall at Colonial Williamsburg that contained centuries-old artifacts, including a silver fork, accidentally preserved by rodents.

atlasobscura.com

468 Upvotes

8 comments

r/todayilearned • u/RaccoonCityTacos • 19h ago

TIL that in 1941 the National Park Service established 16 "mental healing" camps in national parks for U.S. servicemen to use for rest and recovery before being redeployed to the war. By the end of WWII, 33 camps were set up, including those in Yosemite and the Grand Canyon.

nps.gov

4.4k Upvotes

47 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Ill_Definition8074 • 3h ago

TIL The producer of the 1968 film Danger: Diabolik allocated 781 million Italian lire for the film's budget. However, using techniques he learned in his previous films, director Mario Bava completed the film on a final budget of only 200 million lire.

en.wikipedia.org

211 Upvotes

15 comments

r/todayilearned • u/FuckASchwarzenegger • 14h ago

PDF TIL Danish is unusually reluctant to respell foreign words: a Nordic study of newspapers from 2000 found that only 7% of modern loanwords were adapted to Danish spelling, compared with 17% in Swedish, 44% in Norwegian and 48% in Icelandic. Danish also had the highest proportion of English loanwords

helda.helsinki.fi

1.3k Upvotes

394 comments

r/todayilearned • u/DrakeSavory • 17h ago

TIL that a major fire occurred on the American aircraft carrier USS Oriskany when a seaman accidentally lit a parachute flare and in a panic threw it in a locker where hundreds of flares were stored. Later the Oriskany would be the first American warship to be converted into an artificial reef.

en.wikipedia.org

2.6k Upvotes

123 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Alarming-Studio-720 • 1d ago

TIL that in Japanese folklore, Kuchisake-onna is a ghost woman whose mouth is slit from ear to ear. She asks people, “Am I pretty?” Say no, and she kills you. Say yes, and she reveals her mouth and asks again. Say yes a second time, and she may cut your mouth to match hers.

en.wikipedia.org

10.7k Upvotes

898 comments

r/todayilearned • u/wholewheatscythe • 3h ago

TIL that the Chief of Clan MacKay of Scotland, the Lord Reay, is a Dutch Baron, and his ancestor, Aeneas MacKay Jr., was once the Prime Minister of the Netherlands.

en.wikipedia.org

128 Upvotes

29 comments

r/todayilearned • u/AetheriaNox • 1d ago

TIL Highway hypnosis, also known as white line fever, is an altered mental state in which an automobile driver can drive safely and correctly over long distances without consciously remembering having done so.

en.wikipedia.org

23.0k Upvotes

1.2k comments

r/todayilearned • u/60s_timer • 8h ago

TIL the Beach Boys were inspired from the 1965 Beatles' album Rubber Soul to form their 1966 album Pet Sounds, which inspired the Beatles to form their 1967 album Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

faroutmagazine.co.uk

225 Upvotes

41 comments

r/todayilearned • u/CraftyFoxeYT • 21h ago

TIL the Latin alphabet used by the Romans is derived from the Etruscan alphabet, which is derived from the Greek colony in Italy Cumae's Western Greek alphabet, which is derived from the Phoenician alphabet, which is derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs

en.wikipedia.org

2.3k Upvotes

204 comments

r/todayilearned • u/mandywiles • 20h ago

TIL that Methuselah, a Great Basin bristlecone pine located in California, is over 4,800 years old, making it older than the Great Pyramid of Giza.

usda.gov

1.8k Upvotes

35 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Tometek • 15h ago

TIL that from 1544 to 1548, the conquistadors who conquered Peru fought a civil war against the Spanish Crown over laws restricting Indigenous labor. Led by Gonzalo Pizarro, they killed the Spanish viceroy, seized control of Peru, and some even proposed crowning Pizarro king of an independent Peru.

tandfonline.com

637 Upvotes

34 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Ok-Sherbert-6606 • 22h ago

TIL that many of Savannah, Georgia’s cobblestone streets are made from ship ballast stones, brought from ports across Europe and the American northeast and dumped along the riverfront

hmdb.org

2.2k Upvotes

60 comments

r/todayilearned • u/c00lture • 19h ago

TIL that in 1990, the creators of a comedy series formed the “Polish Beer-Lovers' Party” as a joke to promote beer drinking over vodka. It ended up winning 16 seats in Parliament during the 1991 elections.

en.wikipedia.org

891 Upvotes

43 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Sebastianlim • 15h ago

TIL that on October 2nd, 1942, the RMS Queen Mary accidentally collided with the HMS Curacoa, one of her escort ships, sinking it and leading to the deaths of 337 men. A later investigation placed the blame on the Curacoa's crew for the accident.

en.wikipedia.org

434 Upvotes

11 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Sapphire-Crystal • 1d ago

TIL of Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, a Gilded Age millionaire who died when the RMS Lusitania sank in 1915, after giving his own life vest to a young mother and her baby. He couldn't swim and he knew that there were no other lifeboats available at the time. He was 37. The woman & her child survived.

en.wikipedia.org

11.9k Upvotes

710 comments

r/todayilearned • u/mahrogamers • 4h ago

TIL that in 1928 Nikola Tesla was granted a patent for a "helicopter-plane," a flying machine designed to take off and land vertically and then fly horizontally using the same propulsion devices

davidjkent-writer.com

45 Upvotes

14 comments

Subreddit

Posts

Wiki

Today I Learned (TIL)

r/todayilearned

You learn something new every day; what did you learn today? Submit interesting and specific facts about something that you just found out here.

Members Active

41.7m

Sidebar

New to reddit? Click here!

You learn something new every day; what did you learn today?
Submit interesting and specific facts that you just found out (not broad information you looked up, TodayILearned is not /r/wikipedia).

Posting rules

Submissions must be verifiable. Please link directly to a reliable source that supports every claim in your post title. Images alone do not count as valid references. Videos are fine so long as they come from reputable sources (e.g. BBC, Discovery, etc).
No personal opinions, anecdotes or subjective statements (e.g "TIL xyz is a great movie").
No recent sources. Any sources (blog, article, press release, video, etc.) with a publication date more recent than two months are not allowed.
No politics, soapboxing, or agenda based submissions. This includes (but is not limited to) submissions related to:
1. Recent political issues and politicians
2. Social and economic issues (including race/religion/gender)
3. Environmental issues
4. Police misconduct
No misleading claims. Posts that omit essential information, or present unrelated facts in a way that suggest a connection will be removed.
Rephrase your post title if the following are not met:
1. Titles must begin with "TIL ..."
2. Make them descriptive, concise and specific (e.g. not "TIL something interesting about bacon").
3. Titles must be able to stand on their own without requiring readers to click on a link. Starting your title with a why/what/who/where/how modifier should be unnecessary.
4. "TIL about ..." and other broad posts don't belong on TIL. Try /r/Wikipedia, etc. instead, or be more specific (and avoid the word "about").
5. "TIL how to ..." posts belong on /r/HowTo.
6. "TIL the definition of a word..." Word definitions/translations/origins are not appropriate here
No submissions related to the usage, existence or features of specific software/websites (e.g. "TIL you can click on widgets in WidgetMaker 1.22").
All NSFW links must be tagged (including comments).

Please see the wiki for more detailed explanations of the rules, as well as additional rules that may not be listed here

(Why we need rules)

Additional info

If your post does not appear in the new queue and you think it meets the above rules, please contact the moderators (include a link to your reddit.com post, not your story).
Please report spam, inaccurate or otherwise inappropriate posts by messaging the moderators, as this helps us remove them more promptly!
More information available on the TIL FAQ and wiki.

Frequent TILs Repost List

As of May 2026

This list was compiled from /r/todayilearned community suggestions by its members. If your TIL is found on this list, it will be removed. The titles have been abridged for the sake of brevity, however the context remains the same. This list is subject to change. The purpose is to keep content fresh on /r/todayilearned as requested by its members. If you are interested in reading about the TILs on this list use the search box feature and enter the keywords to pull up past TILs.

Etiquette

We ask that you please do the following:

avoid mobile versions of websites (e.g. m.wikipedia.org)
link to the appropriate heading when referencing an article (particularly on Wikipedia)
link to the appropriate start time when referencing videos (e.g. on YouTube)
add [PDF] or [NSFW] tags to your posts, as necessary.
Please avoid reposting TILs that have already made the front page in the past

Please also read the site-wide Reddiquette.

You are loved.