August Holidays and National Days
A word search for every day of August 2027. Each date has its occasion, a line on what the day is about and a free puzzle to go with it, so you can plan the month's puzzles ahead or pick a theme for any day you like. Every puzzle prints in easy, medium or hard, or plays online against a friend.
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Word Search of the Month
August, Day by Day
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Spider-Man Day
Spider-Man was published as a favour to a dying magazine. The editor thought nobody wanted a teenage hero with money troubles and let it run in a title that was being cancelled anyway.
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National Coloring Book Day
Colouring books for adults outsold novels in several countries around 2015, and the biggest seller was drawn by a Scottish illustrator who had expected to sell a few thousand.
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Columbus Sails
Columbus was wrong about nearly everything and got lucky. Educated Europeans knew the earth was round; the argument was about how big, and his estimate was out by about a third.
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National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day
Ruth Wakefield sold her recipe to Nestlé for a dollar and a lifetime supply of chocolate. The often-repeated story that the cookie was an accident is one she denied.
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International Traffic Light Day
The first traffic light was installed outside Parliament in London in 1868, was lit by gas, and exploded a month later, injuring the policeman operating it. Nobody tried again for forty years.
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The Transfiguration
The Bible was not written in chapters. The divisions were added by an archbishop around 1227, and the verse numbers by a printer who is said to have worked them out on horseback.
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National Lighthouse Day
The lens that made lighthouses work is a set of concentric rings that behaves like a glass block two feet thick without the weight. One of them can throw a light twenty miles.
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International Cat Day
Cats cannot taste sweetness. The gene for the sugar receptor is broken in every cat species, which is why no cat has ever been interested in fruit.
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Melon Day
A watermelon is about 92 per cent water, and it was carried across deserts for that reason long before anyone bred it to be sweet.
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World Lion Day
Lions are the only cats that live in groups, and the pride is built around the females — related to each other, hunting together, and staying put while the males come and go.
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Mountain Day
Japan's newest public holiday exists because the calendar had one gap left. There was no holiday in August, so in 2016 the country added one and pointed it at mountains.
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Sue the T. rex Is Found
Sue was found because a truck got a flat tyre. The crew went back to town to fix it, one fossil hunter stayed behind to walk the cliffs, and saw bone sticking out of a wall.
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The Berlin Wall
It went up overnight. Berliners woke on August 13, 1961 to find barbed wire down the middle of the city and the underground trains no longer stopping at half the stations.
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Navajo Code Talkers Day
The only military code never broken in the Pacific war was a language. Navajo had no written form, almost no non-native speakers, and a grammar unlike anything the Japanese had studied.
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Indian Independence Day
India became independent at midnight because the date was chosen by an astrologer's objection. The viceroy's date was considered inauspicious, so the ceremony was held in the hour between two days.
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National Roller Coaster Day
The first American roller coaster was a failed coal railway. A gravity line built to bring coal down a Pennsylvania mountain started selling rides to tourists at fifty cents a head.
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The Klondike Strike
Gold was found on a Yukon creek on August 17, 1896. The news took nearly a year to reach the outside world, by which time the good ground had all been claimed.
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National Mail Order Catalog Day
For fifty years, children in rural America were dressed, shod and equipped for school out of a catalogue that arrived in the post and weighed more than the schoolbooks did.
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National Aviation Day
The first flight lasted twelve seconds and covered less than the wingspan of a modern airliner. Three newspapers were told about it and none thought it worth printing.
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National Radio Day
The first radio broadcast to a general audience was a Christmas Eve programme in 1906 heard by ships' operators who were expecting Morse code and got a man playing the violin.
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The Mona Lisa Stolen
The Mona Lisa became the most famous painting in the world because somebody stole it. Before 1911 it was one good Leonardo among several and most visitors walked past.
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World Plant Milk Day
Almond milk is medieval. It is all over European cookbooks from the 1200s, because it keeps in a warm kitchen and cow's milk does not, and because it is allowed during Lent.
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National Sponge Cake Day
A sponge has no raising agent. It rises on air beaten into eggs and nothing else, which is why it was the hardest thing in a kitchen before machines.
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Vesuvius Buries Pompeii
The bodies at Pompeii are not bodies. They are holes — the shapes people left in the ash as they decayed — filled with plaster by an archaeologist who worked out what the cavities were.
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National Banana Split Day
Bananas are all one variety and they are all clones. Every Cavendish in every shop is genetically the same plant, propagated by cutting, which is why one disease can threaten the lot.
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National Dog Day
Dogs can smell the passage of time. A scent fades at a predictable rate, so a trail tells a dog where something went, how long ago, and therefore which way it was heading.
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The First Oil Well
Edwin Drake drilled for oil in Pennsylvania because the money had run out and he had not told his backers. They had posted a final letter telling him to stop; he struck oil before it arrived.
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The March on Washington
The most quoted passage of the speech was not in the script. Mahalia Jackson called out "tell them about the dream, Martin", and he pushed the text aside and went on from memory.
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More Herbs, Less Salt Day
Salt is the only mineral we eat as a rock, and it is the only seasoning that makes food taste more like itself rather than like something else.
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National Beach Day
Sand is mostly the wreckage of mountains, and a single grain may have travelled for a million years to reach the beach it is on.
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World Distance Learning Day
Distance learning is nearly two hundred years old. A shorthand teacher in Bath advertised lessons by post in 1840, using the new penny postage, and marked the work that came back.
Other Months
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