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.
American here. No idea. Either DD/MM/YYYY or YYYY/MM/DD are more logical, but here we are. When naming/renaming files and including a date in the name, I’ll usually do YYYYMMDD format somewhere. If I’m emailing/texting others, I use MM/DD/YYYY.
Fun little story, the department I work in recently began to work with some people over in the UK, and even though I brought up the date format differences, we’ve already had someone of gett the month and day flipped and it caused some confusion on our end.
Year is the most significant (read: big) unit in the list, but it is the least significant (pertinent to daily life) unless you’re a time traveler. Of month and day, month is more significant than day in both size and pertinence, so it gets ordered first. But when sorting things into folders or file naming conventions, biggest category descending down to smaller categories is always the best.
You articulated what I was thinking, better than I could have. This is it for me.
I’d add that there’s probably a lot of habit involved, plus the fact that everyone else does it.
So not only am I not used to saying “today is the 4th of May”, everyone around me isn’t used to hearing it either and might think I’m being weird.
Because the day doesn’t matter when you work every day between your three jobs that won’t give you 40 hours in order to not give you health insurance.
That escalated quickly…
It’s two less syllables to say “April Fourth” than “The Fourth of April”.
That’s about the only advantage it has.
Edit:
I was thinking about this grammatically. English is an Adjective first language where the modifying adjective goes before the base noun.
In my example, April is the adjective. It tells the reader what kind of Fourth it is.
It’s at least a kind of logic.
Understandable.
FYI, I added more in the base comment.
MORE understandable, Thanks.
Probably because in english it’s the way they speak about dates (and the fact US kinda isolated themselves before WWII).
They started to write dates as they speak dates.
Sounds plausible
As an American it was just what we were taught. However, when I started creating code and being pedantic about organizing files by date, I now prefer YYYYMMDD format as it is, chronologically speaking, superior when prefacing files with it. In this case, in my opinion, it’s better to have the year and then month first prior to day.
To each their own, variety is the spice of life.
ISO is my true north.
This is the only format that truly makes sense, as it is both unambiguous and, as you noted, sortable.
What you say is interesting. Having a way of organizing time that suits your needs. That’s why I asked if there was any benefit in the way Americans (and apparently also Chinese) represent time.
Interesting thing about how Chinese time is organized is locations are also stated big to small. Last names then first names etc.
Locations have a last name and a first name in Chinese?
China’s first name is actually Jim, believe it or not.
I mean the larger family name comes before the personal name. Implying a connection between number, place, and naming sequences
Chinese is also weird imho. If I remember correctly, they put the details of an action first in a sentece and the verb that defines the action itself goes last with some exceptions.
Hungarian comes to my mind which is similar and always follows the context first, details later rule. They use “yyyy.mm.dd.”, “family name first, given name last”, “country, city, street, street number order for locations”, and the word order of their grammar is similar too, details are always at the end of the sentence.
You’re thinking of Japanese not Chinese. Chinese grammar is more similar to English.
That’s interesting about Hungarian though!
This. I usually use MMDDYYYY when I’m dealing with other (US) people and ISO standard for my own stuff.
Because the month is bigger and provides more context on it’s own. You figure out the month first then place yourself within that scale.
Example:
“It’s May (immediately tells us the context of 31days, spring, etc.) It is the 30th, so there’s one day left in May”
Vs
“It’s the 30th (provides no context except that it’s not February). it’s may, so there’s one day left in May”
So both lead to the same conclusion, the first way just gives the limiting parameter/most context first.
Similar reasoning why the month is the primary separation on calendars.
Another example that follow this same principle, you tell time HH/mm to provide the larger context first, not mm/HH.
Surprised I had to scroll all the way to the bottom of the comments to find this answer
you tell time HH/mm to provide the larger context first, not mm/HH.
Except not everywhere does, at least in speech. Half past ten. Quarter to eight. Five past three.
Although in the US I suppose you do say ten thirty, and seven forty-five? So at least you are consistent!
This pretty much sums it up for me, knowing the month first conveys a lot of information. Then the specific day gives more precision, year you can often assume but it’s there in case it’s not what you expected.
The short answer is, it’s what we were taught in school. Like many preferences, it’s shaped by the culture we grow up and live in.
I’m sorry but it doesn’t make sense to me.
Of course not, you were raised and live in a different culture; so, your preferences are different.
Ultimately, the right answer is ISO8601. It’s unambiguous and sorts well on computers. But, I don’t think any culture is teaching that as the primary way to write dates, so we’re stuck with the crappy ways.
There is an American subculture teaching and using ISO 8601; the US military. They don’t call it that, but I learned later that’s what it is. They enforce YYYY-MM-DD on all documents.
YYYYMMDD is commonly used throughout East Asia.
Am American and I hate the MM/DD/YY(YY) format. Unfortunately its what’s been taught and used as the standard date format for a long time.
I much prefer the ISO standard of YYYY-MM-DD. It’s the superior format logically moving from the largest calendar unit to the smallest. Also superior for date ordering files.
Yeah, I resently saw it and I agree with you.
If you name your files YEAR-MONTH-DAY_Filename they be in chronological order when sorted by the name field.
That’s not a good explanation for the question, because the convention was established before computers.
I answered the one question he posed. What is the benefit of doing it the other way around?
It sorts by what seems to me historically by relevance, i.e. which day is asked more often because it seems a more frequent timeframe for everyday use in a medieval society compared to the month (with the seasons as something in between those two).
And I agree that since the digital age yyyy-mm–dd has significant advantages!
I mean it’s easier to sort like that for humans too.
I don’t think that’s true; before computers people would get used to one way or another and it would have 0 impact on their ability to compare.
When you are searching for a file in a filing cabinet of a finance department, it’d be a nightmare if records were filed by month first and year after.
My GP has cabinet with patient information.
The drawers are years, and then inside it narrows down to months. Probably the answer.
YYYYMMDD is the only correct answer.
I can’t say it matters to me that much what order it’s in, but that’s just the same order we say it in when fully written out. March 23, 2025. 03/23/2025.
Maybe it’s a language specific thing? In my native tongue March 23 sounds like a journal entry, not a normal date.
Not an American. But I’ve heard the same explanation. And it does make sense to me.
However, why do Americans say “Fourth of July” then?
Because its a holiday
For some reason doing it that way sounds extra fancy to us. At least it does to me. More formal I guess?
Forth of July is a forced special case that we USians have been conditioned into differentiating. Strange shit like that due to nationalism. We don’t do that for most other dates or holidays, though. Like, hardly anyone goes around routinely saying 31st of October to refer to that holiday.
Maybe the UK equivalent would be the 5th of November. (Or was that just popularized because of V For Vendetta?)
I suppose I’ve heard the Ides of March plenty, as well.
The 5th of November is Guy Fawkes Night in the UK: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes_Night
Guy gets laid night
ITT: defensive answers and ISO-8601 supporters.
Yes, I didn’t quite calculate how controversial the topic would be, my bad…
I think the clear answer is that there is no real reason other than habit and sunk cost fallacy.
See also the metric system, A4 paper, and daylight-saving time.
I’m not Mexican, but this reminds me of a Mexican ranchera that says “No cabe duda que es verdad que la costumbre es más fuerte que el amor” (There is no doubt that it is true that habit is stronger than love).
Why do Americans use MM/DD/YY for date, but not mm:ss:hh for time? Doesn’t that make the same amount of sense?
I don’t know! that’s why I’m asking!
Your looking at it from a digital era. When things were paper based, month-day-year made a bunch of sense.
Our work paper archives are stored in “year” boxes (used to be filing cabinets). Open those, and you have folders that have month-day-year on their tab label. This makes it so you can quickly go through the folders sequentially quickly. If you did YYYYMMDD, you would need to ignore the first 4 numbers. DDMMYYY, the labels won’t be in numerical order.
Putting files back, you look for the correct year, but then it’s easy to drop the folder back into it’s numerical position.
In a digital structure, filing records is automated and we can use a search function, so we do store digital files as YYYYMMDD.
It’s not just Americans. There are many countries in Asia where the default is year month day. If you ever had to organize files by name and date this is the supreme sorting order. Both Europe and North America are getting it wrong.
If this gets you mad don’t ever look into how the French count from 80 to 99. Or how languages disagree on what’s blue or green. These things happen.
I know about the Asians. I work in a Chinese run company and we use WeChat for internal communications. When I have to search for a message from a specific date I always get confused by the way the dates are displayed.
Most significant digits first. You write the thousands place before the hundreds, you write the month before the day. Of course, the whole argument is blow away when you write the year at the end instead of the beginning. (ISO YYYY-MM-DD dates for the win.)
little Endian entered the chat.
Most significant digits first.
That would only make sense if the US wrote the year first, but they don’t. They just seem to slap the date together in a random order
I think that’s context relevant though. If we think about when dates are most frequently used (news, business, planning) it’s typically within the year (or month will give context).
That added with the fact it’s not uncommon in some situations to just provide month/day.
That being said, I don’t think either is better or worse. Just a preference kinda thing, unlike the issue between metric and imperial units.
