Every other country writes the date as either dd/mm/yyyy or yyyy/mm/dd, both of which make sense because they're going from either smallest unit of time to largest unit of time or vice versa.
I believe it’s because of how it’s said colloquially in conversation. I.e. When is your birthday? “It’s August 3rd, 2018” then becomes 8/3/2018.
So the more proper English Empire/Commonwealth answer being “The 3rd of August, 2018.” Which tracks to 3/8/2018.
Would be a good follow on question for folks who speak other languages to find out if the language dictates/matches the formatting or not...
Ironically, a student in the US is in the "fifth grade" not "grade five" like in Canada and the UK.
Except for holidays - "4th of July" or "Cinco de Mayo," etc. - we usually refer to the date as [Month][Xth] so that's the way it shakes out in data gathering.
Now lets talk about the whole expiration/expiry thing...
american english - Date format in UK vs US - English Language & Usage Stack Exchange
CMV: YYYY-MM-DD is the superior date format
Date format
Is there anything actually wrong or illogical about the American date format (MM/DD/Y)?
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Although there are people who will sometimes say:
- Today is Thursday, the 24th of May, 2012.
There are also others who instead say the same thing this way:
- Today is Thursday, May 24th, 2012.
Certainly in the United States, the second way of mentioning a date is more common than the first. The long form sounds more formal to us, as in “on the Fourth of July” being more formal and long-winded than simply saying “on July 4th”.
It was pronouncing the month before the day out loud that gave to retaining that same original order when converted to digits: merely convert the month name to a natural number, and there you have your answer. What’s today’s date? It’s May 24th. Instead of writing May-24, we simply change the “May” to “5” and write 5-24 or ⁵⁄₂₄.
That way it follows the natural language order and so requires no mental gymnastics to switch things around when speaking the date aloud. Similarly “September 11th” gets written ⁹⁄₁₁, etc.
The full spoken form with the year, “May 24th, 2012”, then becomes the written shorthand “5/24/2012”, or often just “5/24/12”. “Christmas of 2001” can be, and somewhat annoying often is, written “12/25/1”, while “January 25th, 2012” becomes “1/25/12”.
This isn’t usually any sort of problem because of universal consensus on how to interpret such things in the United States. If you write day/month/year in America, you will not be understood. Although I myself prefer the ISO notation, normal people do not use it in their daily affairs.
It's very possible that the US inherited this from an outdated English format - much like the length unit, after Henry III's foot and which the English have left behind in favour of the more logical metric system.
One argument I've heard in favour of the American system of dating is that the numbers of months in a year is smaller than the number of days in a month which itself is smaller than the number of possible years. So you would have 12/31/2013, in ascending order. I don't really buy this argument, but OP might be interested in it anyway so here it is.
Meanwhile, in Northern Europe they've moved on to an opposite, descending date standard: year/month/day.