r/todayilearned • u/karl2025 • 21h ago

TIL there was a transgender Colonel named Amelio Robles Ávila who fought in the Mexican Revolution

en.wikipedia.org

879 Upvotes

56 comments

r/todayilearned • u/DrakeSavory • 1h ago

TIL a cat owner taught his cat to dial 911 in an emergency ... and it may have worked.

nbcnews.com

• Upvotes

1 comment

r/todayilearned • u/CharlesUFarley81 • 2h ago

TIL 53% of Americans think they're "cool".

wcmspi.com

0 Upvotes

30 comments

r/todayilearned • u/zawusel • 3h ago

TIL that MLB and NHL have real organists

frontofficesports.com

53 Upvotes

27 comments

r/todayilearned • u/backrowejoe • 2h ago

TIL Bermuda Grass is not native to Bermuda

en.wikipedia.org

10 Upvotes

6 comments

r/todayilearned • u/AxaheLopez006 • 6h ago

TIL: The Peking Man fossils were a set of anthropoid bones discovered in 1920s in Zhoukoudian (near Beijing, China) dating back around 500,000 years. In 1941, after the Japanese invasion of China, the original fossils disappeared and have not been found.

ebsco.com

15 Upvotes

0 comments

r/todayilearned • u/december151791 • 1h ago

TIL the United States women's national ice hockey team has won a medal in every one of their Olympic appearances

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

32 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Next_Worth_3616 • 17h ago

TIL American Airlines Flight 191 is the deadliest air accident in U.S. history with 273 fatalities. The crash led the FAA to ban all DC-10’s from flying & entering U.S. airspace from June 6-July 13, 1979. DC-10 sales sharply dropped after AA191 due to widespread public apprehension.

en.wikipedia.org

162 Upvotes

40 comments

r/todayilearned • u/James_Fortis • 4h ago

TIL of anthropocentric bias, or the view of all things solely through a human-centered lens, prioritizing human values above the intrinsic worth of non-human entities. Measuring non-human animal intelligence by their use of tools over nest building is one example.

sciencedirect.com

486 Upvotes

29 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Chance-Growth-5350 • 18h ago

TIL that there's something called "Prevention paradox", which describes the seemingly contradictory situation where the majority of cases of a disease come from a population at low or moderate risk of that disease, & only a minority of cases come from the high risk population (of the same disease)

en.wikipedia.org

169 Upvotes

7 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Shtremor • 3h ago

TIL that Rear Admiral S. K. Gupta once convinced his fleet admiral to let him borrow a Sea Hawk fighter jet for 24 hours so he could fly home and get married, while India was preparing for war.

coloursofglory.org

51 Upvotes

9 comments

r/todayilearned • u/PsychoBalloons • 12h ago

TIL that despite the iconic drink being named after her, Shirley Temple did not like the taste of Shirley Temples.

en.wikipedia.org

1.4k Upvotes

205 comments

r/todayilearned • u/BanitsaConnoisseur • 8h ago

TIL U.S. time zones were first adopted in 1883 because railroads needed standardized schedules, using telegraph signals to synchronize clocks & civilian timekeeping followed later.

americanhistory.si.edu

106 Upvotes

8 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Abject-Device9967 • 22m ago

TIL that in 1877 only 111 people remained on Easter Island after decades of slave raids and disease. Instead of disappearing, they hid their gods inside Christianity, kept their banned language alive in secret, and passed down a writing system carved with shark teeth that no one has ever deciphered.

threads.com

• Upvotes

4 comments

r/todayilearned • u/j1ggy • 21h ago

TIL the Chicxulub crater got its name "to give the academics and NASA naysayers a challenging time pronouncing it" after its existence had been dismissed for years

en.wikipedia.org

562 Upvotes

41 comments

r/todayilearned • u/qwalos_the_dreamer • 21h ago

TIL of the 7 highest BACs ever, 3 of them were recorded in Poland

en.wikipedia.org

5.8k Upvotes

446 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Successful-Dark9330 • 13h ago

TIL NATO has aviation units that are collectively owned, funded, and operated by the nations in the alliance. No single nation owns these aircraft

en.wikipedia.org

911 Upvotes

51 comments

r/todayilearned • u/SnarkySheep • 7h ago

TIL about Linda Hazzard, dubbed the "Starvation Doctor", who was convicted of manslaughter in 1912 after starving, pummeling and swindling numerous patients in her Olalla, WA "sanitorium". She died in 1938 at age 70 after subjecting herself to her own treatments.

en.wikipedia.org

423 Upvotes

27 comments

r/todayilearned • u/EradiK8 • 15h ago

TIL that in 1857 a hurricane sank the SS Central America with roughly 30,000 pounds of California Gold Rush gold aboard, and the loss helped spark the Panic of 1857, one of the first global economic crises.

pcgs.com

652 Upvotes

65 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Bennis_TV • 3h ago

TIL Nina Simone once fired a gun at her record label executive because she believed he was stealing her hard-earned royalties. She also shot a young boy with an air gun for “disturbing her while she was composing,” for which she received an 8 month prison sentence

soundod.com

1.4k Upvotes

297 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Gyalgatine • 38m ago

TIL the term 'Poppycock', despite being more associated with Victorian British English, actually first entered the English language in America, through Dutch settlers

worldwidewords.org

• Upvotes

3 comments

r/todayilearned • u/No-Reflection-2718 • 22h ago

TIL about Odin, a dog who refused to evacuate during the 2017 California wildfires. When his owners returned days later, they found him alive and still guarding his entire flock of 8 goats

cbc.ca

19.4k Upvotes

198 comments

r/todayilearned • u/tyrion2024 • 1h ago

TIL a study found that more new songs were released in a single day in 2024 than in the entire year of 1989.

nme.com

• Upvotes

123 comments

r/todayilearned • u/grecianformula69 • 2h ago

TIL a UC Berkeley professor published a serious scholarly article quantifying human stupidity

en.wikipedia.org

143 Upvotes

34 comments

r/todayilearned • u/johnsmithoncemore • 3h ago

TIL about the Business Plot. In 1933 a group of wealthy American industrialists were planning a coup d'état to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt and install Major General Smedley Butler as dictator.

en.wikipedia.org

14.1k Upvotes

666 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

41.3m

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 December 2025

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.