February Holidays and National Days
A word search for every day of February 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
February, Day by Day
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National Serpent Day
Snakes did not lose their legs all at once. Fossils exist of snakes with small back legs still attached, and some pythons still carry the hip bones with nothing on the end.
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Groundhog Day
Punxsutawney Phil has been wrong more often than right. Independent checks put his accuracy near 40 percent, which is worse than guessing.
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The Day the Music Died
Buddy Holly chartered the plane because the tour bus had no working heater and his drummer had already been hospitalised with frostbite.
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Lindbergh's Birthday
Lindbergh flew the Atlantic with no radio, no parachute and no front window. He took extra fuel instead and used a periscope to see ahead.
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National Weatherperson's Day
The day marks John Jeffries, born February 5, 1744, who kept America's first weather records and later crossed the English Channel in a balloon, throwing his trousers overboard to stay up.
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Monopoly Goes on Sale
Monopoly was invented to argue against landlords. Parker Brothers bought the version that had stripped the argument out and sold it as a game about getting rich.
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Charles Dickens's Birthday
Dickens wrote most of his novels in monthly instalments, which is why they are long, why they end chapters on a hook, and why he could change the plot based on sales.
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The Boy Scouts Founded
The American organisation started because a Chicago publisher got lost in London fog and a boy walked him to his address, then refused a tip.
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National Pizza Day
The margherita story — three toppings for the three colours of the Italian flag, made for a visiting queen — rests on one letter, and the letter is probably a forgery.
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Deep Blue Beats Kasparov
On February 10, 1996, a computer beat the world chess champion in a serious game for the first time. Kasparov then won the match 4–2 and thought the problem was settled.
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Edison's Birthday
Edison did not invent the light bulb. About twenty people had made one before him. What he invented was the part nobody else had: somewhere to plug it in.
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Darwin Day
Darwin sat on the theory for twenty years and only published when a letter arrived from Borneo setting out the same idea in a few thousand words.
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Galentine's Day
This one was invented by a sitcom in 2010 and escaped into the real calendar within a few years, which almost never happens.
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Valentine's Day
The oldest valentine written in English is a 1477 letter from Margery Brews, sent in the middle of an argument with her father about the size of her dowry.
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Galileo's Birthday
Galileo did not build the first telescope. He heard one existed, worked out how it must function, ground better lenses than anyone else and then pointed it upward, which nobody had bothered to do.
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Tutankhamun's Burial Chamber Opened
Howard Carter had been digging the valley for six years with nothing to show, and his backer had given him one final season. The steps turned up in the first week of it.
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Random Acts of Kindness Day
The phrase was written on a placemat. A writer in Sausalito scribbled "practise random kindness and senseless acts of beauty" in 1982 and people started copying it onto walls.
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Pluto Discovered
Pluto was found by a twenty-four-year-old Kansas farm boy with no degree, who got the job because he had mailed his own drawings of Jupiter to an observatory and asked what they thought.
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National Chocolate Mint Day
Mint feels cold for the same reason chilli feels hot. Menthol opens the receptor that reports cold, and the nerve sends the message whether or not anything has changed.
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Love Your Pet Day
Dogs read human faces better than chimpanzees do. Point at something and a dog follows your finger; our nearest relatives mostly look at the hand.
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International Mother Language Day
The date commemorates students shot in Dhaka in 1952 for demanding that their own language be official. It is the only UN observance that began with a protest about grammar.
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Washington's Birthday
Washington was born on February 11. The calendar changed underneath him when he was twenty, and he moved his own birthday to keep it straight.
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National Play Tennis Day
Tennis scoring runs 15, 30, 40 because of a clock face, and 40 is there because "forty-five" was too long to shout.
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Tortilla Chip Day
The tortilla chip is a factory's way of not throwing things away. Rejects from the production line got cut up and fried instead of binned.
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Clam Chowder Day
Putting tomatoes in clam chowder was once close to illegal. A Maine legislator filed a bill in 1939 to make it a punishable offence.
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Grand Canyon National Park
The first American expedition to see the canyon called it worthless. The 1858 report said it was profitless and that theirs would doubtless be the last party to visit it.
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Pokémon Day
The games began as a boy's insect collecting. Satoshi Tajiri caught beetles in the fields outside Tokyo, watched the fields become apartment blocks, and built the hobby into a cartridge.
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National Tooth Fairy Day
The tooth fairy is younger than the aeroplane. Nobody in America was leaving money under pillows before about 1900, and the character settled into her present form in the 1920s.
Other Months
Looking for today's puzzle? The word search of the day has the full story behind today's occasion and the week ahead. Or browse all word search puzzles.