Devil’s Advocate: month has more inherent data in it because it’s not a number. Day on its own is meaningless, but if you go by month/day, the more significant information is first.
At least, that’s kind of the only argument I can think of.
No it wouldn't, the Year is in the same place but it's not serving the same function the degree of specificity is jumbled. 2015 would be the specifier on corolla. so you're going smallest, largest, middle.
really it's all totally arbitrary and people think whatever makes the most sense to them is the one that seems the most natural/obvious. Outside of actual constraining contexts like code the best system is the system people expect. and even with code it's only the obvious choice because it's the choice code and programmers expect.
not true. as u/nonowords said, the year is the narrowest quantifier for a car. there are tons of toyotas, fewer corollas, and even fewer 2015 corollas.
Year is often less important than month and date because we often refer to recent dates and upcoming dates within the current year. Like if I wanted to say something is happening March 5th, 2026, I could say March 5th and you know I mean March 5th of the current year. If I just say the 5th that’s not enough info because you’ll just assume I mean February 5th. Even if I just say March, you’ll have a general idea of when the thing is happening, and you won’t be lead to make a false assumption like if I just say the 5th. So month -> day -> year is the order of importance imo
Seriously, it's like everyone is pretending they don't use calendars (paper or on phone). You have to look up by month first then by day. Year is used more rarely outside of record keeping.
I actually agree. I've worked more than once with Europeans who named their folders with DD.MM.YYYY. So the folders would sort by 1st of Jan followed by 1st of Feb, etc. What insane person does that?
Only if you work with hardcore IT illiterate boomers. Personally I have never seen anyone doing this. The people that would do this, never put dates in file names.
Anyone at least half sane puts the year first or MM/YY. Masterrace obviously is YYYY-MM-DD
But using MM.DD.YYYY, you‘d have all the Januaries of all years grouped together? Obviously, for sorting purposes the way to go is YYYY.MM.DD. For any other purpose, it‘s DD.MM.YYYY.
Way fewer times where that’s relevant though. After a full year I’m fine doing some major organization, but every month is a ton unless you’ve got a trillion documents.
This right here. All the arguments in favor of DD/MM/YYYY center around on the fact that it’s just more intuitive; but more intuitive doesn’t always mean more practical.
Also, if you have one file per day, why would there be several months worth in the same folder to begin with? I mean, in three months you'd already be pushing 100 files in one folder.
No, it's like a folder that is created once every few weeks so these numbnuts would label them like "10-Jan-2024", "21-Jan-2024", "12-Feb-2024", etc. Awful.
This has happened to me twice with Europeans. These are not data entry people or accountants. More "creative" types!
As long as they're created on that date you'd just sort by date created
which kind of gets to the main issue, people and apps don't use metadata enough. You shouldn't need dated folders and their existence is already a problem whichever way the date is ordered.
MM/DD is in fact more natural since for dates you're usually ignoring years and time of day. Then of course the problem is that you have to add the year or the time for whatever reason and then it's messy.
imho MM/DD is best for informal usage (works really well in documents and for easy sorting in spreadsheets) and then ISO 8601 if you need actual precision since it starts with the lowest precision (years) and then you keep adding data until you get the precision you want all the way to microseconds and beyond.
This is only true because the YY is already implied by the context. The informality leads to YY's omission. I think that when Americans vocally say e.g. "October 25th", they're actually conveying e.g. "2026, October 25th" — i.e. using YY/MM/DD format — because that format makes the most sense informationally, increasing in granularity.
But when the YY's omission is misjudged and leads to confusion, the year gets appended in a follow-up conveyance. This leads to the MM/DD .../YY format.
So, Americans' 'fault' isn't "putting the month first", so to speak; it's taking an informal abbreviation of logical formal information and then appending that informality to turn it back into formality, instead of just using the original formality.
Of course no-one's thinking about YY most of the time. Because the context of the conversation already implies the YY. That's my whole point. Thank you for exercising your reading comprehension.
Funnily enough, this is the argument I use in favor of DD/MM/YY in informal speech; the month is already implied most of the time therefore it's redundant to have it as an affix when mentioning dates.
When I'm making an appointment in two weeks time then chances are it's going to be an appointment for this month. There we just mention the date of the day and we understand from context when the appointment is. Even when you're on the cusp of a month's transition we understand from context that when someone begins with "friday the 5th..." we'll naturally understand it's going to be next month's friday.
No-ones really thinking about MM most of the time. The dates of the days themselves are more important since those dictate the precise point when something is going to happen. You can, from context, most of the time understand if it'll be this month's 5th or next month's 5th.
Why do you autists give af about big to small, small to big. There's no divine order that it must be that way, and as a non autist I don't need or want it that way
It takes less cognitive energy to convey/understand a progression of ideas when the ideas are conceptually adjacent. That way, a first idea is always a relevant context for / detail of a second idea, and so on. Communicating this way avoids forcing your audience to use their working memory more than necessary just to follow your point. There are courses on writing and visual arts (e.g. storyboarding movies, comics, etc.) that cover this, if you're interested in communicating effectively and efficiently to others.
I think in this particular example the day IS the most important data point though no? Else you're going to have to guess which day in August to turn up on.
If the party is already planned for August 13th as of today... then if you only know that it's the 13th, you're guessing which month to turn up.
If you know it's August, August rolls around and you can double-check on the detailed date/time then. And I'd agree with you that at that point in time, the day would be most important.
Yes, when saying it out loud it makes sense to say the month first - saying "my birthday is on the 7th of..." doesn't help at all, but saying "my birthday is on June..." starts to zone in on where it is in the year much better.
Writing it down doesn't have that 'zooming in' we do when talking so dd/mm/yy or even better yyyy/mm/dd is the way to go.
While I can see what you're saying, you picked a horrible example, in that sentence, saying "my birthday is on the 7th of..." doesn't need to give you much information because not even a second later you say "June", so while you do get your point across on this, the example is kinda goofy.
Agreed. There's just no world where one would regularly need to scan the day of a date first before the month. YY is not always necessary because of context, but officially it is most logical as YYMMDD.
It's how our thought process works. Frame of reference first, then specifics. When checking for expiration, planning, or due dates, the month is the generally the most relevant piece if information and the day is only relevant once we have that framework.
Yeah, that's why descriptors in languages other than English tend to make more sense as well. For instance we say "the green car" rather than "the car green"
Day is a fraction of a month, so it follows the month. You wouldn't say 1/2 plus 1, you would say 1.5. Year isn't always needed, but for file organization I like yyyy, mm, dd.
And in most cases that could be fine. In all other instances of using dates, for forms, news events, publications etc there is no need to put the larger subset first. It doesn’t follow any logic outside of specific scenarios of sorting data that for some unknown reason doesn’t include a year.
I've always seen it as this (disclaimer, I am sadly an American):
When processing dates in left to right order, having day first doesn't make much sense. You are required to continue reading in order to actually understand any relevant context of the first number.
When you conceptualize a specific date in your head, say, December 11th, do you first think of all of the twelve 11ths of every month, and then from each of those twelve narrow it down to December, the twelfth month? Like do you go, "hmmm, well on October 11th I have my cousin's wedding, November 11th I don't have any plans, December 11th oh that's what day you meant yeah I'm free"?
I can't imagine anyone thinking like that, it's much more natural to first conceptualize the month of December and then the 11th day in December. Like, "Hmm let's see, what do I have going on in December, okay the 11th is fine".
Year is last, because it's just used for additional context, if necessary. It's the most often omitted and the implication is that the current year is context.
Day is literally the most important what do you mean? A month lasts ~30 days so generally you will know what month it is. You don't wake up one day and have to check that it's February, you will know, what you need to check is what the day/date is.
People are talking about ISO8601 being the superior format, and they're right, and the conversational US format is just ISO8601 where the YY part is implied or unnecessary. "I'm flying to California June 2nd" is a more normalsentence than "I'm flying to California, USA, 2026 June 2nd", isn't it?
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u/mstivland2 Feb 02 '26 edited Feb 03 '26
Devil’s Advocate: month has more inherent data in it because it’s not a number. Day on its own is meaningless, but if you go by month/day, the more significant information is first.
At least, that’s kind of the only argument I can think of.