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.
Many computer systems store dates starting with the year. Isn’t that interesting?
I was taught DD/MM/YY and that’s what I use in typed form, but I prefer MM/DD/YYYY, at least in speech e.g. ‘June 13th 2025’. It feels cleaner to narrow by month, then day, otherwise you’re mentally having to wait for context, working backwards. The year is almost irrelevant as it changes so infrequently, about once a year.
ISO 8601 for organising on a computer, as sorting by largest to smallest is the most logical.
I completely agree with you.
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
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.
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!
Wrong
this is terrible
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.
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It would make sense if they were going YYYY/MM/DD. But they literally do MM/DD/YYYY
WTF
What’s your birthday? When saying it, do you start with the year?
I am pro-ISO 8601 but I see how MMDDYYYY could be tempting to Murca
The Chinese do.
Because the month tells me more about how far in the future something is. If I have an appointment on the 12th of July, there’s not much information in knowing it’s on the 12th. 12th of what? But it’s in July, so between 1 and 2 months in the future. If I need more info, then I’ll pay attention to the day. So in order of information given.
Historical dates are similar, except I really just need (roughly) the year, and then a month if that’s relevant. Knowing the exact date of a historical event is just showing off. But if you know the month, you know what season it was, what the weather was probably like. Was it planting/growing/harvest time? You can guess at a lot of things with just the month.
Perhaps because where I live there are no seasons in the same way as in the United States, knowing the month doesn’t matter to us unless we work in the fields, here there are only months of sun and months of rain.
Sure, but if I tell you the month, you still know what part of the year it is. If it’s sunny, or if it’s rainy must mean something to you.
Mmm not so much. I prefer to know on the first day so, for example, how close I am to payday, which is every two weeks. I don’t care that much about months other than December since I finished college.
Yeah that makes sense then. I live in Minnesota and the seasons definitely matter here. Every 3 months will be a completely different drastic changes to temperature, weather, etc. So for planning, the month definitely matters and I think it makes more sense for us to say it first.
Not that it really matters that much haha.
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.
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.
Linguistics
In UK English, it’s considered proper to write “the 6th of March” as “6 March” and sometimes read as “6th March” which can be jarring to Americans as their shorthand is “March 6th” and when “6(th) March” is encountered in written form, it’s expanded to the full “6th of March” when spoken
That doesn’t mean this won’t be yet another feature American English absorbs from UK English but right now flipping them in speech requires a few extra syllables and people are lazy
people are lazy
Kinda relatable ngl 😅
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 does make more sense if you put it that way.
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.
Why do you care? There are so many other cultural differences to highlight, history and music and art that only exist overseas, hundreds of millions of people with the same dreams and ambitions you have. Why on earth would you focus on something so trivial?
… Curiosity? Some interesting things are hidden in the most trivial information.
In normal conversation, it’s more common (at least here) to say “May 31st” than “the 31st of May.” I think the order of the numerical only dating system is just reflecting that.
Then again, you also write $5 but say it five dollars. The way something is said can be different from how it is written.
Then why “fourth of July”?
Because English isn’t allowed to be consistent.
Probably specifically to stress that it is A Special Day and not just july fourth
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.
That’s the ISO-8601 format, Japan uses “/” or alternatively yyyy年mm月dd日
You can also sort files named using this format alphabetically and they’ll still be chronologically correct.
