Some lesser-known-known miscellaneous facts include that the longest word in the English language has 189,819 letters, the shortest war in history was between Britain and Zanzibar in 1896 and lasted only 38 minutes, and the first recorded use of the word "hello" as a greeting was in a letter written by Thomas Edison in 1877. Additionally, a group of flamingos is called a flamboyance, and the world's largest snowflake on record measured 15 inches wide and 8 inches thick.