the first of April

I’ve already seen a few mentions of the day of practical jokes, but there are three variations of the spelling.

1. April Fools Day
2. April Fool’s Day
3. April Fools’ Day

My newly purchased dictionary and dictionary.com say April Fools’ Day, but my almanac says April Fool’s Day. Two sites about the history of the day also use April Fool’s Day.

It doesn’t look like Google even cares about the placement of the apostrophe and if there isn’t one, the results are only slightly different.

April Fools Day (74,300)
April Fool’s Day (63,200)
April Fools’ Day (74,300)

I hope the war doesn’t dampen funny people’s desire to make others chuckle, because gosh darn it, I want to chuckle.

Comments

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  1. I have yet to see a prank. I was really looking forward to it.

    Comment by jason on April 1, 2003 @ 11:17 am
  2. I thought you might have tried to do a mirror sight or something like the google one.

    Comment by whaleman on April 1, 2003 @ 1:21 pm
  3. Well, did anyone fool you?

    Comment by Renee on April 2, 2003 @ 8:29 am
  4. Nope, but it was mostly because no one tried.

    The best one I saw was Metafilter being purchased by Google.

    Besides a few articles on slashdot, there wasn’t much else.

    Comment by dan on April 2, 2003 @ 11:00 am
  5. I actually got fooled last night. I was supposed to eat dinner at a girl’s apartment, but when I got there, she wasn’t there. Turned out she was down the hall with dinner ready in another apartment.

    Comment by Cameron on April 2, 2003 @ 11:13 am
  6. Apostrophe S is short for “is”, or it siginfies possession. Since the April Fool does not own the day, and there’s no way to fit “is” in that sentence without sounding like a total jackass, the correct spelling is: April Fools Day.

    I think.

    Comment by sean on April 2, 2003 @ 11:32 pm
  7. Ah, but it is known as the day of fools, which implies possession. If there are many fools, which it seems that there are, then it’s the fools’ day. Otherwise, it’s the fool’s day.

    Comment by dan on April 3, 2003 @ 8:41 am
  8. Perhaps the April Fool is the archetype for all the pranksters who play jokes on the first of April. Not so much a real fictional person, like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, but an abstract entity named as a person– the essence of the prankster.

    That’d make April Fool’s Day correct.

    Comment by Levi on April 4, 2003 @ 8:59 am

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