March Holidays and National Days
A word search for every day of March 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
March, Day by Day
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The First Word Search
The word search is younger than the moon landing programme. The first one ran on March 1, 1968, in a free want-ad sheet in Norman, Oklahoma, and it hid 34 Oklahoma towns in a 20×20 grid.
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Read Across America Day
Dr. Seuss wrote The Cat in the Hat out of 236 words from a first-grade vocabulary list, because a magazine article had argued that school readers were so dull they were putting children off books.
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World Wildlife Day
Rainforest covers about six percent of the land and holds more than half the species. A single hectare in Ecuador can carry more tree species than the whole of North America.
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National Grammar Day
March 4 is the only date on the calendar that is also a command, which is why a grammar teacher picked it.
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The Boston Massacre
The soldiers who fired on the crowd were defended in court by John Adams, who got most of them acquitted and later called it the best thing he ever did for his country.
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National Oreo Day
Oreo was a copy. Sunshine Biscuits had been selling the Hydrox — same two dark wafers, same white filling — for four years when Nabisco launched theirs on March 6, 1912.
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Bell Patents the Telephone
Bell's patent was filed on the same day as a rival's caveat for the same idea. Whether his lawyer got there first by hours is still argued about.
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International Women's Day
March 8 is on the calendar because of a strike. Petrograd's women textile workers walked out in 1917, and the czar was gone within eight days.
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Barbie's Debut
Barbie was reverse-engineered from a German novelty doll sold to men in bars. Ruth Handler found it on holiday, bought three, and brought them home to Mattel.
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Mario Day
The date is the joke: MAR10. Nintendo noticed people writing it that way and made it official.
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The Great Blizzard of 1888
New York went to bed in the rain on a mild March evening and woke to snow past the first floor. Drifts reached the second-storey windows and two hundred people died in the city alone.
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The Girl Scouts Founded
Juliette Gordon Low telephoned a cousin on March 12, 1912 and said she had something for the girls of Savannah, and all of America, and they were going to start it that night.
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National K9 Veterans Day
This one belongs to the US Army, not to a dog. March 13, 1942 is when the War Dog Program began and the military started taking dogs from families who volunteered them.
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Pi Day
Pi has been calculated to more than a hundred trillion digits. NASA uses fifteen, and that is enough to navigate a spacecraft across the solar system to within centimetres.
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The Ides of March
The ides were just the middle of the month — the 15th in March, the 13th in most others. It took Shakespeare to make the phrase sound like a warning.
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Goddard's First Liquid-Fuel Rocket
It flew for two and a half seconds and reached forty-one feet. Every rocket that has ever left the atmosphere is descended from it.
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Saint Patrick's Day
The first St Patrick's Day parade was not in Ireland. Spanish Florida held one in 1601, and Boston and New York were marching long before Dublin was.
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The Gardner Museum Heist
Thirteen works walked out of a Boston museum in 1990 and none has been seen since. The empty frames still hang where the paintings were.
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Texas Western Wins the Title
On March 19, 1966 a coach started five Black players in the national championship against an all-white Kentucky team that had never recruited one. Texas Western won by seven.
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The March Equinox
Spring does not arrive everywhere at once, and it does not arrive from the south. It moves north at about fifteen miles a day, roughly walking pace.
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World Poetry Day
The oldest author whose name we know was a poet, a woman, and a priestess in Ur. Enheduanna signed her hymns about 4,300 years ago.
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World Water Day
Nearly all the water on Earth is in the ocean, and almost all the rest is frozen. What is left, liquid and fresh and reachable, is well under one percent.
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National Puppy Day
Puppies are born deaf and blind and stay that way for about two weeks. The sense that works from the first minute is smell.
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Koch Announces the Tubercle Bacillus
On March 24, 1882 Robert Koch told a room of Berlin physicians what caused tuberculosis. Nobody applauded, asked a question or objected. They sat in silence and then went to look down his microscopes.
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Tolkien Reading Day
The date is not his birthday. March 25 is the day the Ring goes into the fire, and readers picked it rather than the publisher.
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Spinach Day
The story that a decimal point error made spinach famous for iron is itself false — but the reputation it produced is real enough that Popeye was built on it.
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Washington's Cherry Trees Planted
The first shipment of cherry trees from Japan had to be burned on arrival. They were riddled with insects and disease, and the whole consignment of two thousand went into a fire.
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Easter
Easter can land on any of thirty-five dates, from March 22 to April 25. Working out which one takes a table of full moons, and the churches kept those tables for centuries.
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World Piano Day
The date is the 88th day of the year, chosen to match the 88 keys. In a leap year the piano gets it a day early.
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National Doctors' Day
The date marks the first use of ether as an anaesthetic, in rural Georgia in 1842 — four years before the famous Boston demonstration that got the credit.
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The Eiffel Tower Opens
It was built to be demolished. The permit ran twenty years, and Paris fully intended to take it down in 1909.
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.