Genuine, and easy to check. The supercomputer Deep Thought delivers it in Chapter 27 of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, first published in London by Pan Books on 12 October 1979 ↗; the answer had already reached the public on BBC Radio 4 in “Fit the Fourth” on 29 March 1978. The book sets the line out with Adams’s own pauses — “The Answer to the Great Question… Of Life, the Universe and Everything… Is… Forty-two” — which the popular one-line form smooths away.
“The Answer to the Great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is Forty-two” said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm. — Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (London: Pan Books, 1979), chapter 27. Verified at quotle.info
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In context
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Provenance
Chapter 27 — and the radio series that came first
Work
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
First published
Pan Books, London, 12 October 1979
Location
Chapter 27 — the supercomputer Deep Thought delivers its answer
First broadcast
BBC Radio 4, “Fit the Fourth,” 29 March 1978
“All right,” said Deep Thought. “The Answer to the Great Question…” […] “Of Life, the Universe and Everything… Is… Forty-two,” said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.
abridged
The ellipses inside the speech are Adams’s own, marking Deep Thought’s pauses — not editorial cuts. The bracketed break stands for the intervening dialogue. Quote Investigator ↗ places the passage at pages 179–180 of the 1981 Pocket Books printing (1979 copyright), verified with scans.
Quote Investigator ↗ credits Adams, traces the scene to the 1978 radio programme, and quotes the novel passage from scans of the 1981 Pocket Books printing at pages 179–180.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was first published by Pan Books on 12 October 1979 ↗, so the text is firmly in copyright in the United States — nothing about this line is public domain. Rights rest with Douglas Adams’s estate and its publishers; the short passage above is quoted here for identification and comment.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What gets garbled
The line itself is real, and it has not been stolen from anyone. What travels is a smoothed-down version of it — plus a long tail of theories about where the number came from that Adams demolished himself.
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The wordingThe smoothed-out one-liner paraphrase
Adams wrote the sentence with Deep Thought’s stately pauses built in: “The Answer to the Great Question… Of Life, the Universe and Everything… Is… Forty-two.” Reprints routinely close the gaps, and the still-shorter “the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42” is a summary rather than a line anyone speaks. Same sentence, stripped of its timing — Wikiquote files the punchline under Chapter 27 ↗.
✕
Great vs Ultimate“the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything” conflation
Both phrases are in the book, but not in the same mouth. Deep Thought announces the answer to the Great Question; the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is howled by Loonquawl in the following chapter ↗.
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The wrong book“What do you get if you multiply six by nine?” later volume
The famously mismatched Question is not in the 1979 novel at all. It arrives at the end of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), when a Scrabble-playing caveman spells it out — “Six by nine. Forty two.” ↗
✕
The origin of the numberLewis Carroll, Tibetan monks, base 13, binary 101010 debunked by the author
✓The line is genuine and it has not drifted: Douglas Adams wrote it for Deep Thought in Chapter 27 of the 1979 novel, after the answer first aired on BBC Radio 4 in March 1978 — and Quote Investigator verified the passage against scans ↗.
Context
Why it mattered
Deep Thought is switched on to answer the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, and warns its makers that this will take a while. Seven and a half million years later ↗ it delivers: forty-two. The joke was never the number. The joke is that nobody had worked out what the question was, so the answer is useless — which is why the story then needs a second, far larger computer, and why that computer turns out to be the Earth.
It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one.
The number Adams had already used once
42 was not new to him. Adams had written a sketch for The Burkiss Way called “42 Logical Positivism Avenue,” broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 12 January 1977 ↗ — before Hitchhiker’s put the number on air in “Fit the Fourth” on 29 March 1978.
In an interview with Iain Johnstone recorded in 1998 but never broadcast, Adams offered a longer account: he had worked as a prop-borrower for John Cleese on Video Arts training films, Cleese needed a funny number for a sketch punchline, and Adams believed the number Cleese landed on was 42 ↗. Stephen Fry, for his part, says Adams told him the real reason and that he has vowed to take it to his grave.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1952–2001 · English author, humourist & screenwriter
Douglas Noël Adams was an English author, humourist and screenwriter who turned a late-night BBC Radio 4 comedy into one of the most quoted books in science fiction. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy began as a 1978 radio series, became a novel in 1979, and grew into a “trilogy” of five books that sold more than 14 million copies in his lifetime; he also adapted it for television in 1981 and wrote a 1984 video game. He died in Santa Barbara, California, in 2001.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (London: Pan Books, 1979), chap. 27; the answer first broadcast as “Fit the Fourth,” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, BBC Radio 4, March 29, 1978. Passage verified by Quote Investigator against scans of the 1981 Pocket Books printing, 179–80.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The Answer to the Great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is Forty-two’?” Last verified 9 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-answer-to-the-great-question-of-life-the-universe-and/