I’m sorry but it doesn’t make sense TO ME. Based on what I was taught, regardless of the month, I think what matters first is to know what day of the month you are in, if at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of said month. After you know that, you can find out the month to know where you are in the year.
What is the benefit of doing it the other way around?
EDIT: To avoid misunderstandings:
- I am NOT making fun OF ANYONE.
- I am NOT negatively judging ANYTHING.
- I am totally open to being corrected and LEARN.
- This post is out of pure and honest CURIOSITY.
So PLEASE, don’t take it the wrong way.
I’m a fan of ISO-8601 which is YYYY-MM-DD. When context is known, dropping the year on something is fine (i.e. if I post a schedule saying ‘summer 2025 schedule’, I don’t need to start every date on it with 2025). Japanese does this as well (and I think Chinese and Korean, but someone is welcome to correct me if I’m wrong there).
If the year and month are already known, just using the day is fine as well (a calendar doesn’t write the full date in every square). Having it in that order makes sense to me.
MM-DD-YYYY is right out, though, so I only agree with the 'muricans on the MM-DD part.
Same. Keeps my reports nice and organized.
Canada’s government has this standard, YYYY-MM-DD, but even they are inconsistent.
The rest of Canada often follows America’s MM-DD-YYYY.
It’s the inconsistency that’s ridiculous.
Be the change you want to see. I use month names or ISO 8601 in anything written, have been for a year to the point where using month names is more accidental than anything else. If anyone asks, I mention it’s government standard. Hopefully, the ambiguous date forms die out faster than the Imperial system.
Whoo. ISO-8601 fan club. Its so much easier for computers to sort dates in that format. I insist on using it for documents at work and Excel even handles it better with less formatting issues. I do wish they covered it in schools earlier, its neat, logical and works best when everyone is on the same page.
I think it’s just the way we talk. It’s just more common for us to refer to a date in speech like “Today is June 1st”. Whereas other countries would say “Today is the 1st of June”. Neither is wrong, it’s just how things are said.
It’s more efficient to say June 1st. I suppose you could say 1st June though. Not sure if anyone does that.
They say it “June 1st”, as opposed to “1st of June”, so it makes sense to write it that way. That, mate, was a hard lesson to learn for me lol.
As an American I’m not really a fan of it mainly because it’s different from the World standard. We are the only country that insists on doing it different. It would not be hard to change either. I would love for it to change but it’s not something I’m putting a lot of time or thought into right now.
deleted by creator
I say June 2nd of 2025
I type 2025-06-02
Handwritten it’s 2-June-2025
I’m from before 2000 and the turn to years being so small broke me, it used to be so clear which number was the year with just 2 digits, and day, month, year is sorting from smallest unit to biggest, it has logic. But then for awhile you could have a 04, an 05, and an 06 and I was working with other countries, it wasn’t at all clear which was year month or day, so I started sandwiching the month in the middle as a word when handwriting dates and using 4 digit year, and year month day sorts like a dream for filenames.
The US is the only one to do many stupid things, like imperial units
I wondered whether maybe the us americans had continued using the old style and it was Britain that changed, but no: Britain appears to have been using the day-month-year order since medieval times. This latin letter from William Wallace from 1297 has that order: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Lubeck_Letter
*Given at Haddington in Scotland on the eleventh day of October in the Year of Grace one thousand two hundred and ninety seven. *
The latin line with the date starts with “datum”.
I think it was a 18th century British fad that spread to America - for example, look at the date on this London newspaper from 1734:
- in the text it does also use the other format about “last month”, however.It didn’t make it into legal documents / laws, which still used the more traditional format like: “That from and after the Tenth Day of April, One thousand seven hundred and ten …”. However, the American Revolution effectively froze many British fashions from that point-in-time in place (as another example, see speaking English without the trap/bath split, which was a subsequent trend in the commonwealth).
The fad eventually died out and most of the world went back to the more traditional format, but it persisted in the USA.
Great find.
I checked a few other historic front pages on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_newspapers The Oxford Gazette from 1665 used the same month-day format. The first edition from The Guardian from 1821 also used it. Some British news papers like The Times never stopped using it, while The Guardian is now using day-month. So it was the British after all.
Context clues.
For no other reason than to be different and contrary. Metric system anyone?
Are you saying we Americans do things in objectively worse ways, just to remind everyone what we have the freedom to be confidently wrong?
Because I can confidently tell you there’s no examples of us doing that. (This is sarcasm, intended to amuse you.)
The month first is best because consider what happens if a message gets cut off. You might get: “You’ll be flying to New York on the first of …” or “You’ll be flying to New York on June…”
The first message doesn’t tell you anything useful. Do you need to buy shorts or a parka? Do you have months to prepare or are you leaving in a few hours? Could this be an april fools joke? It’s a 1/12 chance. Totally useless.
Second message, sure the details are unclear but at least you know what to pack and that you need to hurry about getting the rest of the message.
Historically, I don’t know, but personally, I prefer YYYY-MM-DD style dates since they sort naturally in basically all computer software without having to think about it.
ISO 8601 rules!
RFC 3339 is where it’s at
Free sorting is always the way to go.
Anyone who doesn’t use ISO 8601 is wrong.
FACTS
No. RFC 2822 (short format) is also great. “20 Mar 2025”
no letters! Go away letters!
Until you try to sort your log files alphabetically.
This is for display, not data processing.
Also guess what, journalctl formats date like “May 21 00:48:56” (probably according to system locale). Why would you sort your log files alphabetically? They should already be in chronological order.
Wrong
this is terrible
There are plenty of other scenarios with a similar pattern of starting at the larger scale and then the specific.
TV shows: Season 2 Episode 9
Theatre: Act one, scene 3
Biblical: Book of John 3:16
Other books: Chapter 9, page 125.
Address: 123 Main St, Apt #2
Phone numbers: country code (area code) locality-individual
I’m not saying either is right or wrong, but there are precedents for either way.
Perhaps the most relevant of all: time of day. 9:30. Hours first, then minutes. I’m not from a location that does month-day ordering, but I think largest to smallest works excellently for time measurement, hence ISO 8601.
9:30 and 21:30, please
I’m surprised I didn’t even think of that. It’s so obvious!
9:30
Which I would say as “Half past nine”.
2-123 Main St, City, Province, Country
