April Fool’s Day

As today is the first day of April, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity for Time Travel Tuesday to look at the origins of “April Fool’s Day”.

How the practice of playing tricks on others on this day came about is lost in the mists of time, but looking at various sources, it seems that many people believe it started in sixteenth-century France. Britannica, the encyclopaedia, explains that King Charles IX issued an edict that the new year would no longer begin on Easter Sunday, a date determined by the lunar cycle and which had been the first day of the year in Christendom for centuries. The year would now start on a fixed date: 1 January. It is said that those who stayed true to the old ways were referred to as “April Fools”.

But that was France where French is spoken, of course. What about “April Fool’s Day” in English? Both the OED and M-W give 1748 as the date the term was first recorded in English. It appeared in the title of a song published in the British Magazine, the words of which (and more on the origins of April Fool’s Day) can be found here.

So there you have it. No fooling! Happy April Fool’s Day, and may you be nobody’s fool.