# American date format, why month, day, year? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 17, 2004, 7:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-date-format-why-month-day-year/240551 "2004-04-17T19:06:37Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![TheLoadedDog](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/35a633/32.png) [@TheLoadedDog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TheLoadedDog)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2004, 7:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-date-format-why-month-day-year/240551/41 "2004-04-18T19:21:58Z")
As a small child, my teacher made us start each day by writing the date. It was in the lengthy and formal format of: _Thursday, 1st October, 1976_. It might even have been _Thursday, the 1st of October, 1976_. My memory fails me. The ordinal numbers _1st, 5th_ etc seem these days to have died out, replaced by the cardinal \*1, 2, 3… \* etc. I held out against this for years (my teacher would have been proud!), but have succumbed within the last few years. These days: **I say** “the first of October”. **I write** “01/10/76” **I formally write** “01 October 1976” If I’m dealing with Americans, I’ll also use the “01 October, 1976” format. I am usually aware of the US mm/dd/yy format, but the problems really arise when the helpful Yank thinks, “Aah, he’s an Aussie, I’d best use dd/mm/yy”, and then it goes to all hell… I think I tend to do this a lot though in textual online dealing with Americans - not just for the date either. Rather than write “mum” (and I’m physically incapable of writing “mom”), I’ll stick to “mother”. That kind of thing. I don’t include the SDMB in this though - here Commonwealth English speakers can pretty much write naturally. ---
**Author:** ![Myglaren](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f1d935/32.png) [@Myglaren](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Myglaren)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2004, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-date-format-why-month-day-year/240551/42 "2004-04-18T21:00:34Z")
> [@missbunny](#): > > Because in English we WRITE “December 1, 2004,” rather than “1 December 2004.” So when we WRITE the date in numeral format, we WRITE 12/1/04 and not 1/12/04. > > Sheesh. > > “December the first”? Sounds bizarre to me. > > “When is Christmas Eve?” “It’s December the 24th.” (I could see saying, “It’s the 24th of December,” but not “It’s December the 24th.”) > > Who talks like that? I do! ---
**Author:** ![Sample\_the\_Dog](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/8797f3/32.png) [@Sample\_the\_Dog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sample_the_Dog)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2004, 9:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-date-format-why-month-day-year/240551/43 "2004-04-18T21:40:03Z")
> [@Myglaren](#): > > I do! Me too! It’s not odd to hear my family say something like “September the 16th” when asked for someone’s birthday or when an event occured. Other people where I grew up also will say it, although the “June 21st” format is more common. About the only people who say “21 June” are lawyers, cops, and government workers. I really liked the way I often saw it done in Spain, using Roman numerals for the month so there’s no question. March 2, 1970 would be 2/III/1970. I don’t know if that’s common over there now (or then, really) or if it was just a custom with the people I lived with. I always write the date in the format 10 Apr 2004 unless I’m absolutely required to do otherwise, then I follow the required format. Come, join me, start a bloodless revolution! 😉 But yeah, the American way of writing numerical dates is just screwed up. ---
**Author:** ![WILLASS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/54ee81/32.png) [@WILLASS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WILLASS)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2004, 9:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-date-format-why-month-day-year/240551/44 "2004-04-18T21:50:49Z")
Let the revolution begin! 😃 ---
**Author:** ![MonkeyMensch](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/82dd89/32.png) [@MonkeyMensch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MonkeyMensch)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2004, 11:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-date-format-why-month-day-year/240551/45 "2004-04-18T23:21:15Z")
> [@WILLASS](#): > > Let the revolution begin! 😃 I am filling up sand-bags and buying ammo. I write _21 October, 2001_ and such. But I say, “October 21, 2001.” Yeah. That’s right. I don’t use ordinals. Walk down my street and see how you feel about conventions. You can have my date formats when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers… ---
**Author:** ![Nametag](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/nametag/32/406_2.png) [@Nametag](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nametag)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2004, 1:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-date-format-why-month-day-year/240551/46 "2004-04-19T01:52:21Z")
Only in the European system does one get this cool fact: Tuesday is 20/04/2004 🆒 ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2004, 11:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-date-format-why-month-day-year/240551/47 "2004-04-19T23:02:54Z")
We’ve been overlooking a few facts here. First of all, the “rest of the world” does not write dates the British way. Continental Europeans write the month in Roman numerals. You can even see our French Doper **clairobscur** writing that way sometimes. American: 4/19/2004 British: 19/4/2004 French: 10.IV.2004 Since the millenium bug hysteria started in the late 1990s, I took to always writing the year with all four digits. If we’d been doing that in the first place, there would have been no millennium bug and no hysteria. Note that the French way uses periods and not slashes to separate the numbers. In fact, I learned to separate the numbers with dashes, not slashes, when I was growing up. I don’t know why, or exactly when, but at some point, maybe in the 1980s? Americans seem to have made a collective, unspoken decisions to all start using slashes. Has anybody noticed this change? I never liked the slashes and I still use dashes to this day. Thus: 4-19-2004. Second, the United States military has its own style for writing dates, and puts the day first, and the month in the middle. Just as in Europe. However, the U.S. military writes the month not with numbers but with a three-letter abbreviation. Thus: 19 Apr 2004. As for including a leading zero when the day or month number is less than 10 … if it isn’t needed for a computerized format, if you’re just writing in nondigitized regular English, why bother? It sure looks dumb! If you write 04/05 for April 5, it looks like you should read it “Oh four.” But nobody in their right mind would say April oh five or April oh fifth. So please leave out the friggin’ leading zero. It’s only for computers; humans don’t need to write like that. ---
**Author:** ![Sample\_the\_Dog](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/8797f3/32.png) [@Sample\_the\_Dog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sample_the_Dog)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2004, 11:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-date-format-why-month-day-year/240551/48 "2004-04-19T23:08:04Z")
> [@Jomo Mojo](#): > > We’ve been overlooking a few facts here. > > First of all, the “rest of the world” does not write dates the British way. Continental Europeans write the month in Roman numerals. What’s this “we” s–t, paleface? What am I, invisible? Is this thing on? 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Tamex](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ccd318/32.png) [@Tamex](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tamex)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2004, 2:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-date-format-why-month-day-year/240551/49 "2004-04-20T02:17:59Z")
Well, we’ve certainly been doing it that way for a long time. The [Declaration of Independence](http://www.law.indiana.edu/uslawdocs/declaration.html) mentions the date July 4, 1776. So, was Thomas Jefferson declaring independence from British traditional date format? Or, was this the way British dates were written and the convention changed later as **Fish** is implying? ---
**Author:** ![Blornx](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/b5a626/32.png) [@Blornx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blornx)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2004, 8:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-date-format-why-month-day-year/240551/50 "2004-04-21T20:25:03Z")
IMHO (U.S. citizen), Given two facts: 1. A date is commonly abbreviated to just the month and day without the year. 2. Significant digits universally come first by convention in societies that write left-to-right. We therefore end up writing a date as “Month/Day”. The year, if we feel like writing it down at all, ends up getting appended to the end – Month/Day/Year – because the end of a sequence is the most natural place to append a piece of data. Well I’m sure everyone agrees having more than one date convention causes confusion. Year/Month/Day should be the most logical format, so don’t tell me the European way is best. ---
**Author:** ![cckerberos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f0a364/32.png) [@cckerberos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cckerberos)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2004, 1:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-date-format-why-month-day-year/240551/51 "2004-04-22T01:22:25Z")
> [@straykat23](#): > > I know that someone will say that in the mid-Eighties the emperor had been in office only twenty-something years, not thirty-something. Sorry, but it’s Saturday night, it’s late, and I do remember ‘32’ although I could be a little bit off. Actually, he would have been in office for about sixty years in the mid-Eighties 🙂 Yes, the tendency for older Japanese and bureaucrats to use the old Imperial reign dating system is a pain, even for younger Japanese. But it is better than the even older system, believe it or not. Japanese dates are usually given in YYYY/MM/DD if using the Western calendar. To help prevent the confusion you describe above, many people, if using the reign calendar, would write the current date as H16/4/22. H16 = Heisei 16 = the 16th year of the reign of the Heisei emperor. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/american-date-format-why-month-day-year/240551.md?page=2)