In honor of National LEGO Day this week, a Factslap column dedicated to the original barefoot buster:

• The plural of LEGO is LEGO.
• According to the LEGO Group, the word “LEGO” is not a noun; rather it is an adjective, as in LEGO bricks, LEGO products, LEGO universe, etc.
• The word “LEGO” is from the first two letters of the Danish words “Leg” and “Godt,” which means “play well.”
• Ole Kirk Christiansen (1891-1958) created the LEGO Group in 1932 as a way to use old wood from his failed carpentry business. He patented the now famous interlocking LEGO blocks in 1949.
• Ole Kirk Kristiansen, founder of the LEGO Group, actually didn’t invent LEGO bricks. A British man named Hilary Fisher Page (1904-1957) invented the first bricks, but he died before he could discover that LEGO had “borrowed” his invention.
• If laid end to end, the number of LEGO bricks sold in one year would reach over 5 times around the globe.
• There are 86 LEGO bricks for every person on earth.
• LEGO produces 318 million tires a year, or over 870,000 each day.
• LEGO sells over 400 million tires each year, which makes LEGO the largest tire manufacturer in the world.
• There are over 4 hundred billion Lego bricks in the world. Stacked together, they would be 2,386,065 miles tall, which is ten times higher than the moon.
• One LEGO can bear up to 4,240 Newtons of force, or over 953 pounds.
• A single LEGO brick can support 375,000 other LEGO bricks before buckling. This means that a person could build a LEGO tower 2.17 miles high before the bottom LEGO brick would begin to break.
• LEGO bricks are part of a universal system, which means that a piece made in 1958 would fit with a piece made today.