April Holidays and National Days
A word search for every day of April 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
April, Day by Day
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April Fools' Day
The BBC once filmed Swiss farmers harvesting spaghetti from trees, and enough viewers rang in asking how to grow their own that the switchboard had to be briefed.
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International Children's Book Day
Hans Christian Andersen wanted to be remembered as a novelist and a playwright, and was faintly irritated that the fairy tales kept outselling everything he thought was serious.
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The First Mobile Phone Call
Martin Cooper made the first handheld mobile call on a New York pavement in 1973, and used it to ring his rival at Bell Labs and tell him where he was calling from.
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The Flag Act
The flag settled its own argument in 1818: thirteen stripes for the original colonies and one star per state, added on the Fourth of July after each joins.
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First Contact Day
Star Trek fans mark April 5 as the day humanity first meets aliens — in 2063, which means the anniversary is still ahead of us.
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The First Modern Olympics
The 1896 marathon was won by a Greek water carrier who had never run one. He stopped for a glass of wine on the way and still finished seven minutes clear.
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World Health Day
The single intervention that has saved the most lives is not a drug. It is clean water and sewers, and it saved more people than every medicine of the twentieth century combined.
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Hank Aaron's 715th
Aaron chased the record through a year of death threats and had to be given a police escort and an armed bodyguard. He kept the hate mail, all of it, for forty years.
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National Unicorn Day
For centuries the unicorn was not a fantasy animal. It was in the Bible, in natural histories, and the horns sold across Europe were real — they came off narwhals.
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The Titanic Sails
She left Southampton on April 10, 1912 and nearly hit another liner before clearing the harbour. The suction from her propellers snapped the moored ship's ropes.
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National Pet Day
Cats purr at a frequency that overlaps the range used in physiotherapy to help bone heal, which is a good fact with an unproven conclusion attached.
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Yuri's Night
Gagarin did not land in his spacecraft. He ejected at four miles up and came down by parachute in a field, where the first people he met were a farmer and her granddaughter.
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Scrabble Day
Alfred Butts counted letters on the front page of the New York Times by hand to work out how many of each tile the game needed. That count is why the board still plays the way it does.
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National Gardening Day
A seed can wait a very long time. Date palms have been grown from seeds found in a desert fortress and carbon-dated to around two thousand years old.
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Leonardo's Birthday
Leonardo finished almost nothing. About fifteen paintings survive, several of them incomplete, and he carried the Mona Lisa around for sixteen years still working on it.
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Save the Elephant Day
Elephants greet each other after a separation with a ceremony — rumbling, urinating, spinning, ears out — and the longer they have been apart the bigger it gets.
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National Haiku Poetry Day
The seventeen-syllable rule is an English invention. Japanese counts sound units that are shorter than syllables, so a faithful haiku in English runs to about twelve.
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Paul Revere's Ride
Revere never shouted that the British were coming. He was on a secret ride through country full of British patrols, and half the people he was warning still considered themselves British.
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National Garlic Day
Garlic has no smell until you damage it. The reaction that produces the aroma only starts when the cell walls break, which is why a whole clove is almost odourless.
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Deepwater Horizon
The well leaked for 87 days and nobody could stop it. It is the largest accidental marine oil spill there has ever been, and it began two days before Earth Day.
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National Kindergarten Day
The word means "children's garden", and Friedrich Fröbel meant it literally — children were the plants, the teacher the gardener, and the point was to let them grow rather than fill them.
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Earth Day
April 22 was picked around the school calendar. Senator Gaylord Nelson wanted a date between spring break and final exams so students could show up, and 20 million did.
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World Book Day
UNESCO chose April 23 because Shakespeare and Cervantes both died on it in 1616. They did not die on the same day — Spain and England were on different calendars, ten days apart.
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Hubble Launched
Hubble went up on April 24, 1990 with a mirror ground to the wrong shape. The error was about a fiftieth the width of a human hair and it made every image blurred.
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World Penguin Day
Emperor penguins dive deeper than any other bird — past 500 metres — and stay under for twenty minutes on one breath.
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Audubon's Birthday
Audubon shot the birds he painted, often several of each, and wired the bodies into lifelike poses. It is why the plates look alive and why they are all exactly life size.
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National Prime Rib Day
Meat does not "seal in the juices" when you sear it. That was disproved in a laboratory in the 1930s and has been repeated in cookbooks ever since.
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National Superhero Day
Superman was rejected for six years. The two teenagers who created him eventually sold the character outright for $130 and a contract to keep drawing him.
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International Dance Day
Jean-Georges Noverre spent his life arguing that ballet should tell a story instead of being a sequence of poses. He lost that argument repeatedly before winning it.
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International Jazz Day
The most famous jazz album was recorded almost without rehearsal. Miles Davis handed the band sketches on the day and most of what was released is a first take.
Other Months
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