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.
Anyone who doesn’t use ISO 8601 is wrong.
FACTS
No. RFC 2822 (short format) is also great. “20 Mar 2025”
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.
no letters! Go away letters!
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.
I’m surprised I didn’t even think of that. It’s so obvious!
9:30 and 21:30, please
9:30
Which I would say as “Half past nine”.
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 like it. Many agree that YYYY-MM-DD is superior. It also reflects informational entropy. Each additional piece of information narrows down the search space most efficiently.
But in normal conversation, chances are we’re talking about the current year. So it makes sense to skip the year, or save it for last.
Word by word, if someone says the month first, I’m already able to know roughly when this date is. Then the information is hammered out with the day.
If someone says the day first, it barely helps — could literally be in any month of the year. It leaves too much unknown until the next piece of information is received.
Spoken language is already inefficient, which is why we use so many shortcuts in it. If I’m texting someone about an upcoming event, I might also just use the day of the month or the weekday (wings on Fri?). But if I’m writing an email, signing a document, or doing something else that might be referenced weeks, months, or years in the future, ISO 8601 is the way to go.
Every digital clock displays hours:minutes:seconds. Largest to smallest. I see no reason not to follow the same pattern with the date year/month/day.
This is also how my phone time stamps a photo - year/month/day/hours/minutes/seconds.
This seems very logical to me.
Everybody says this, but I keep seeing mm/dd/yyyy from north American sources, and dd/mm/yyyy from pretty much everywhere else.
Why are we stupid
In hungary we use yy/mm/dd
And AFAIK estonia, china, japan and mongolia too
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We read left to right.
Hour left makes sense as hour is very important to know, many times for important than the minutes.
With dates year is usually not that important to know, and day/month became much more important to know in a daily basis. So they get a preference.
For instance, a doctor gives you an appointment on 2025-07-25. The first thing you read is 2025, which os not very important as the day and month, as you could already assume the day. A date on 25-07-2025 gives you important information sooner.
I agree but my appointment is three months from now, so knowing that it isn’t this month is more important than knowing the day of the month first.
Is it honestly more common to have something in another month than the current one?
yes.
my last 5 dr appts have been at least 2 months out, sometimes up to 8 months.
I can live with getting that important information a half second later.
I’m sure the history is that, for most daily purposes, it was useful to know both. Knowing the larger element (the month) first sets the context for the smaller detail. For instance, saying I met someone for dinner on December 12 gives you the broader context (e.g. the season, possible relevant events) before the smaller detail of the day.
I think of it as, if you got shot halfway through telling me the date of something, “December” on its own is more useful information than “12”. Technically, “12” narrows it down to fewer possible dates, but it could be at any time of year, while December only happens once a year, in March or whatever.
That explains it, getting shot halfway through a sentence is far less likely outside America.
I does make more sense if you put it that way.
I personally prefer yyyy-mm-dd, as the Japanese do, which also puts month before day. I think it’s because they tend to prioritize history, so that makes sense. Year gives a historical context, month gives the season, while day is kind of arbitrary when talking about historical events. Day will matter most if I’m making short term plans, though, so I certainly see the appeal for day to day life.
Depending on what you’re doing, one will matter more. Precision matters more the more fine tuned the situation.
Think of it like hours vs minutes vs seconds. If I’m just thinking vaguely about the time of day, hour gives me most of the context. If I’m meeting someone or baking cookies, minutes matter a lot more but seconds is a bit too specific. If I’m defusing a bomb? Seconds matter.
You can also sort files named using this format alphabetically and they’ll still be chronologically correct.
That’s the ISO-8601 format, Japan uses “/” or alternatively yyyy年mm月dd日
Yeah I know it by the latter but didn’t try to type it out on this phone, lol
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.
Why do you use 60 seconds in a minute and not an even 100? Why use randomly sized calendar months? Why do you say doce instead of diecidos?
Why do you use 60 seconds in a minute and not an even 100? Why use randomly sized calendar months?
Because 60 evenly divides into halves, thirds, fifths, sixths, etc, and because it’s impossible to divide 365.2425 days into 12 months of equal length.
I’m a fan of 12 months of 30 with a 5 day new years in between
The first two are true that they don’t make any sense, but the “Diecidos” is because it sounds horrible.
In any case, you understand why conventions exist and persist despite imperfection
Ooh ooh I know whe calander one. 2 or 3 roman empowers were so up their own arse they added there names to the calander. Augustus being the only one I remember off the top of my head. In order to make them fit they shortened other months.
Isn’t this also why September is not the 7th month, and October is not the 8th month?
Yeh. They stuffed em in random places each time I’m sure it made sense at the time
They renamed mens quintembris and mens sextembris to July and August. Originally, The Roman year started on the spring equinox at 1 March, and September–December were indeed the 7th—10th month of their year. Spring equinox shifted over the centuries due to an incorrectly calculated length of the year. I forgot why they shifted New Year to 1 January and who did this.
Legacy reasons
That’s it
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.
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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”.
