Yes, this is a question about date-format which has always laid there simmering in my head.
But now is the time to ask it!
In Sweden, they use the format year/month/day and in Iceland we use day/month/year.
Both make sense, since it’s either ascending or descending.
But why put the day in the middle? It makes no sense at all to me?
Please put my mind at ease and tell me why this is so.
July 22, 2008
07/22/08
It’s a US usage that corresponds to their usual written format of “January 15, 2007”.
But that’s not an explanation (if one exists).
And ftr, It’s written 22. July, 2008 here in Iceland.
How is it not an explanation? The American style is to write dates as they are said, which is like “July 22nd, 2008.” Now, as a computer programmer, I can tell you that month-day-year is a horrible representation for dates, but it makes perfect sense to humans who are used to thinking about dates that way.
Well, you are not going to find any definitive explanation or justification for any of these styles.
An argument can be made that putting the month first provides some essential information right off the bat (what time of year, roughly, are we talking about?) whereas putting the day does not.
I’m not arguing that position, but it is a position.
Friedo
It’s not an explanation since it just writes out what I said in the OP. I guess I should’ve been more clear in it though.
I just find it an odd way to do things and was looking for any possible explanations - which the “makes perfect sense to humans….” part of your reply is.
But don’t you guys say 4.th of July? Or is that just the exception that proves the rule?
This Wikipedia article describes the US format for dates “Middle endian”. (The term “Middle endian” derives from “Big endian” and “Little endian”, which in turn derive from a dispute about how to open boiled eggs in Gulliver’s Travels.
It’s just the way the date is specified in the English language, a convention that predates computers by far. Thus, indicating the date in the order of month-day-year makes it easier for English speakers to read, as they would otherwise have to mentally rearrange the order when reading it (July 22nd, 2008), while for example a German-speaking person is more comfortable with the day-month-year order in which dates are specified in German (22. July 2008). In contrast, the year-month-day order is easiest to sort and therefore has some logical justification.
We do say 4th of July, but in that format it’s the unofficial name for our holiday of Independence Day, not the usual rendering of that date. You will occasionally find people saying “It’s the 12th of January” but it’s kind of rare. Our most often used format is “January 12th” or “May 26th”.
That wiki article was quite interesting, but brought up the good point of the US and the UK diverging in the usage. Which makes the “write it as it sounds”-theory less convincing (to me).
This, was a very interesting bit:
So now I’ve found the reason for the way we write it.
I guess it’s just the way it is… like why you don’t use the metric system 
Nah. That’s because we’re stubborn and everlastingly suspicious of foreign innovations.
Gottcha on 4th of July. More name than date, so to say.
I read that last as ‘foreign interventions’… 
Out of curiousity, if I were to ask you the day, WormTheRed, how would you answer me? Here in the US, I’d expect to hear “July 22nd”. Do countries/languages that write the date before the month also speak it that way?
Absolutely. It’s to the point where I hear “the 4th of July” and it doesn’t even register as a date, anymore…it’s just a name for the holiday.
After working in a large cheque processing department for nine months, I can assure you that it really doesn’t matter what date format a country uses, as long as everyone is using the same one. Canadians, unfortunately, use every date format you can imagine (and some you can’t), even with all of our banks trying to force people to use a standardized date format. The down side of this is that banks can’t process cheques if the dates are ambiguous (is 9/7/8 July 9th or September 7th?). Even with date blocks printed on our cheques (in the format DD/MM/YYYY), people still refuse to use a standardized date format here. There’s a little insight into the supposed easy-going Canadian psyche that you might not have suspected. 
Right. The holiday “The Fourth of July” is on July 4th.
I am an American but i have always said and written my dates the European way just because i believe it makes more since. It has given me weird looks and espically in school has made some teachers upset because it confuses them epicssally if i use numerical format for the month name.
I think it’s a more formalized way of saying a date. In a formal invitation, for example, you might see a date written as “Saturday, the 25th of June,” but in regular writing or speech, it would be “Saturday, June 25.” Saying it “the 4th of July” might be a holdover from when speech and writing were more formal as a matter of course.