July Holidays and National Days
A word search for every day of July 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
July, Day by Day
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ZIP Codes Introduced
The five digits are not arbitrary. The first is a band of the country running west, the next two narrow to a regional hub, and the last two pick the post office.
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Amelia Earhart Disappears
She was looking for an island two miles long in an ocean, using a radio she could transmit on but barely receive with, and had left the trailing aerial behind to save weight.
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The First Car Drive
Karl Benz built the first car and could not sell one. His wife took it without telling him, drove sixty miles to her mother's with their two sons, and made it famous.
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Independence Day
John Adams expected July 2 to be the holiday. That is the day Congress voted to separate from Britain; the 4th is the day it approved the wording.
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Dolly the Sheep
Dolly was born on July 5, 1996 and kept secret for seven months. She was named after Dolly Parton, because the cell she was cloned from came from a mammary gland.
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Lennon Meets McCartney
They met at a church fête in Liverpool on July 6, 1957. Lennon was sixteen and playing in a skiffle band on the back of a lorry; McCartney was fifteen and had come to see a girl.
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The First Sliced Bread
Otto Rohwedder's first bread slicer burned down with his prototype and his blueprints in 1917. It took him another eleven years to build it again.
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Da Gama Sails for India
Vasco da Gama left Lisbon on July 8, 1497 with four ships and about 170 men. Fewer than sixty came home, and two of the ships were burned for want of crew to sail them.
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The First Wimbledon
The first championship was staged to buy a new roller for the croquet lawns. Twenty-two men entered, the final was delayed by rain, and about two hundred people paid a shilling to watch.
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Tesla's Birthday
Tesla and Edison fought over whether electricity should be sent as direct or alternating current. Tesla was right, and died broke in a hotel room feeding pigeons.
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Free Slurpee Day
The Slurpee was invented by accident by a man whose soda fountain broke. He put the bottles in the freezer, they came out half-frozen, and customers preferred them that way.
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National Pecan Pie Day
The pecan is the only major tree nut native to North America, and almost every one you eat comes from a grafted clone — seedlings do not breed true.
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National French Fry Day
They are almost certainly Belgian, and Belgium has been arguing about the name for a century. The theory is that American soldiers in the First World War met them in French-speaking Belgium and filed them accordingly.
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Bastille Day
There were seven prisoners in the Bastille when the crowd stormed it, and none of them was political. Four were forgers, one was an aristocrat locked up by his own family.
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The Rosetta Stone
A French soldier repairing a fort wall in Egypt noticed a slab with three scripts on it. The bottom one was Greek, which meant the top two could finally be read.
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National Cherry Day
Washington never chopped down a cherry tree. A bookseller named Parson Weems invented the story in 1806 because he thought it would sell copies, and he was right.
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Disneyland Opens
Opening day was a disaster. The tarmac was still soft and women's heels sank into it, a plumbers' strike meant Walt had to choose between working toilets and working drinking fountains, and thousands got in on forged tickets.
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Nelson Mandela Day
Mandela spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years in prison breaking rocks in a lime quarry. The glare permanently damaged his eyes, and photographers were later asked not to use a flash.
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National Words With Friends Day
Zynga put July 19 on the calendar in 2021, twelve years after the game launched. It is the closest thing word games have to a holiday of their own.
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National Moon Day
The landing computer threw five alarms on the way down because it was being asked to do more than it could. A twenty-six-year-old in mission control recognised the codes and said go.
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The Coldest Place on Earth
The lowest temperature ever measured on the surface of the Earth was −89.2°C, recorded at a Soviet research station in Antarctica on July 21, 1983. It is midwinter there.
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Pi Approximation Day
Written the European way, today is 22/7 — the fraction Archimedes proved pi was smaller than, more than two thousand years ago.
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National Vanilla Ice Cream Day
Vanilla comes from an orchid that only one bee in Mexico could pollinate. Every vanilla pod grown anywhere else is pollinated by hand, flower by flower, on the one morning it opens.
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National Drive-Thru Day
This one is an ad campaign that stuck. Jack in the Box invented the holiday in 2002 to talk about its own windows, and the date settled on July 24 in 2006.
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National Hot Fudge Sundae Day
The sundae exists because of laws against selling ice cream sodas on a Sunday. Take the soda water out and you have something nobody could object to.
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Carl Jung's Birthday
Introvert and extravert are Jung's words, and he did not mean shy and outgoing. He meant where your attention naturally goes, and where you get your energy back.
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Bugs Bunny's Debut
"What's up, Doc?" was not written as a catchphrase. It was a regional greeting the director had grown up with in Texas, thrown in as a throwaway, and the preview audience laughed so hard the next line was lost.
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The Metric Act
The United States legalised the metric system in 1866 and has never required it. The Act made metric units lawful for trade and left everything else alone.
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National Lasagna Day
Lasagna is probably the oldest pasta shape there is, and the name originally meant the pot, not the food.
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Henry Ford's Birthday
Ford did not invent the car or the assembly line. What he did was double his workers' pay overnight, and the reason was that he could not keep anyone.
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Harry Potter's Birthday
Harry and his author share a birthday. She gave him July 31 — her own — and the books count his years against it precisely enough that fans have built a calendar of the whole series.
Other Months
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