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13 March 2026
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13 March 2026
2026-03-13
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13 03 2026
14:07
Why do Americans write the date as mm/dd/yyyy rather than dd/mm/yyyy or yyyy/mm/dd?
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...
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Why do Americans prefer the MM/DD/YYYY date format both in written and spoken?
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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...
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.
How come US is the only country that uses Month-Day-Year data format more than other formats? I look at the list on Wikipedia and while other countries use this format, they also use other formats as well. It seems like most of the countries are influenced by US. Canada especially.
Why do Americans in general prefer this format both verbally and orally? What is the origin behind this preference? Isn't it easier to say it in ascending or descending order? What makes saying the month first so special? I'm asking this as somebody who grew up with MM-DD-YYYY. A lot of people from other countries tend to get confused at times with this format.
I don't have a pointer to published research - but in my experience US folk will always assume the US MM/DD/YYYY format unless they are knowingly using an non-US site, and are already aware of the potential differences.
If you have to use numbers only then the format that causes least confusion across cultures in my experience is YYYY-MM-DD since it differs from both "defaults" and doesn't suffer from any assumptions.
That said using an abbreviated three letter month name is only one extra character - the size argument for using numbers is usually bogus.
Please see ISO 8601 (eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601)
yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss
First, this is simply the largest to the smallest unit. No other argument--no matter how tightly held--can seem to overcome this logic.
The 4-digit year removes any confusion as to what the other numbers represent--even when the hyphens are left out. (Use of a 2-digit year--in any order--cannot always establish anything.)
I discovered this dating schema decades ago looking at a Star Trek calendar and saw that stardates were yyyymm.dd (Note: I was looking at calendars--not Star Trek stuff.)
I am an American with a mild dyslexia. I saw (or perceived) just enough dates that were written "backwards" that I could and can never remember which order we are expected to presume they mean if the days (or years) are also 1-12. (I also eschew the " / " as these make the date look confusing.)
I use year-month-date both with and increasingly with out hyphens or spaces; and day, year month date where the day and the month are spelled out. This is by my choice--the ISO 8601 just gives me a fallback argument--in case I ever need one.
NOTE: Some software programs might use, eg, "mm" for minutes, "MM" for month in numbers, and "MMMM" for the month spelled out; "hh" might mean 12-hours and "HH" might mean 24-hours. All of these codes within their own software are subject to the whim of the programmer(s).
I bought this from a Belgian (I think) online store that sells American products because I wanted to taste these famous peanut butter cups and I was surprised to see the dates like this. So is this date system also used in American English after all? 🤔
BTW, it doesn't seem to be a European imported version of the product.