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April Fool's Day or All Fools' Day is a holiday celebrated in many countries on April 1. The day is celebrated by the execution of hoaxes and practical jokes of varying sophistication with the goal of publicly embarrassing the gullible.

History

The special meaning of April 1 originates in the change to the Gregorian calendar by King Charles IX in 1582. Before that, New Year was celebrated from March 25 to April 1. With the change of the calender system, New Year was "moved" to January 1. People who forgot or didn't accept the new date system were given invitations to nonexisting parties, funny gifts etc. This was known in France as poisson d'avril (April fish).

Hoaxes

Some media organisations have either unwittingly or deliberately propagated many hoaxes, and the worldwide spread of the Internet has also assisted the pranksters in their work.

Some particularly well-known April Fool's Day hoaxes include:

• Kremvax: one of the early Internet April Fool's day hoaxes.
• San Serriffe: The Guardian printed a supplement featuring this fictional island.
• Smell-o-vision: The BBC purported to conduct a trial of a new technology allowing the transmission of odour over the airwaves to all viewers. Despite the fact that no such capability existed, many viewers reportedly contacted the BBC to report the trial's success.
• Spaghetti trees: The BBC television program Panorama ran a famous hoax in 1957, showing the Swiss harvesting spaghetti from trees.
• Metric time: Repeated several times in various countries over the year, this hoax claims that the time system will be changed to some system where one subdivision is some power of 10 smaller than the next.