May Holidays and National Days
A word search for every day of May 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
May, Day by Day
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The Empire State Building Opens
It went up in 410 days, about four and a half storeys a week, and came in under budget. Then it sat almost empty for a decade and the city called it the Empty State Building.
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The Battle of Hogwarts
The books were rejected by twelve publishers. The thirteenth took it because the chairman's eight-year-old daughter read the first chapter and demanded the rest.
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World Press Freedom Day
The first English newspaper to survive more than a few issues was printed in Amsterdam, because printing it in London would have been illegal.
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Star Wars Day
The joke is older than the fandom that adopted it. A London paper ran it in 1979 to congratulate Margaret Thatcher: "May the Fourth Be With You, Maggie. Congratulations."
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Cinco de Mayo
It is not Mexican independence day. That is September 16. May 5 marks one unlikely battlefield win in 1862, and it is a bigger occasion in the United States than in Mexico.
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The Four-Minute Mile
Doctors had argued the four-minute mile was beyond human physiology. Once Bannister ran it, another man did it forty-six days later, and thirty-seven more within three years.
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Beethoven's Ninth Premieres
Beethoven was completely deaf by the premiere. He stood beside the conductor beating time to a performance he could not hear, and had to be turned around to see the applause.
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Coca-Cola First Sold
It was invented as a patent medicine by a pharmacist recovering from a wound and a morphine habit, and sold nine glasses a day in its first year.
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Europe Day
The European Union began as a plan to pool coal and steel, on the reasoning that countries which share a war industry cannot easily fight each other with it.
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The Golden Spike
The telegraph operator wired a single word to the whole country when the last spike went in: "DONE". Bells rang in San Francisco and New York within seconds. It was the first live national news event.
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National Twilight Zone Day
Rod Serling turned to science fiction because the censors would not let him write about anything real. Aliens could say things that people in a drama about the American South could not.
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International Nurses Day
Florence Nightingale's real weapon was statistics. She invented a kind of pie chart to show generals that most of their soldiers were being killed by the hospitals rather than the enemy.
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Brazil Abolishes Slavery
Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, on May 13, 1888, and it took in more enslaved Africans than anywhere else on earth — around ten times the number brought to the United States.
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Jenner's First Vaccination
Jenner tested his idea by deliberately infecting his gardener's eight-year-old son with smallpox to see whether cowpox had protected him. It had.
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National Straw Hat Day
New York once had a riot about hats. For three days in 1922 gangs snatched straw hats off men's heads and stamped on them, because the unofficial season had ended.
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National Barbecue Day
Barbecue and grilling are not the same thing, and the difference is about four hours. Grilling is fast and direct; barbecue is low, slow and smoky, and started as a way to make cheap cuts edible.
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Minecraft's First Public Release
Minecraft was put online on May 17, 2009 by one Swedish programmer, unfinished, on a games forum, with a note asking people to try it and say what broke.
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International Museum Day
The word comes from the Greek for a seat of the Muses, and the first great one — the Museum at Alexandria — was closer to a research institute than a gallery. Nobody was looking at exhibits.
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New England's Dark Day
On May 19, 1780 the sky over New England went dark at noon. Candles were lit, birds roosted, and the Connecticut legislature debated adjourning in case it was the Day of Judgment.
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Levi's Rivets Patented
Levi Strauss did not invent jeans. A tailor in Nevada did, got stuck for the sixty-eight dollars the patent would cost, and wrote to his cloth supplier proposing they file it together.
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The American Red Cross Founded
Clara Barton spent the Civil War carrying supplies to battlefields nobody had sent her to, and was shot through the sleeve while holding a wounded man. The bullet killed him.
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Conan Doyle's Birthday
Conan Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes on purpose, to get time for the historical novels he thought were his real work. Twenty thousand readers cancelled their subscriptions and City men wore black armbands.
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World Turtle Day
A turtle's shell is its skeleton. The ribs and vertebrae are fused into it, which is why it cannot be left behind and why the shell can feel a touch.
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Morse's First Telegram
The first message sent down the line from Washington to Baltimore was "What hath God wrought", chosen by the daughter of a friend who had told Morse about the funding before he heard officially.
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Geek Pride Day
May 25 was chosen because it is the anniversary of the first Star Wars release. It is also Towel Day, for Douglas Adams, and the two have merged into one date by accident.
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National Paper Airplane Day
The record for the longest paper aeroplane flight is nearly 90 metres, and it was set by a team that included a competitive javelin thrower to do the throwing.
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National Sunscreen Day
SPF is not a clock. SPF 30 blocks about 97 percent of burning rays and SPF 50 about 98, and the gap between them is far smaller than the number suggests.
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National Hamburger Day
At least five American towns claim to have invented the hamburger, and in every case the evidence is somebody remembering it decades later.
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Everest Summited
Hillary and Tenzing agreed never to say which of them stepped onto the summit first, and kept to it for the rest of their lives.
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Water a Flower Day
The most expensive flower bulbs ever sold went for the price of a canal house in Amsterdam, and the market collapsed in a single week in February 1637.
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The Johnstown Flood
A private dam above a Pennsylvania steel town failed on May 31, 1889 and killed more than two thousand people in under an hour. The clubhouse it protected belonged to Carnegie, Frick and Mellon.
Other Months
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