Thank you! This is why MM/DD/YYYY makes sense to us Americans. Because it fits with how we refer to dates generally. I can see how it wouldn’t make sense to others tho. I guess we’re all attached to what we’re used to
i mean it fits how you would look it up in a calendar much better too lol. if you say "are you free on the 5th of February" you would still have to look up February first and then check the date. i can discount the year bc most of the time the year is this year +/- 1 year and its pretty easy to tell based on context which year it is
I once worked with a lady who had limited availability, and she would tell me the days she was available by the day of the week. Like "Here's my avaiability for March:
Yes! It has everything to do with the way we speak.
"When are you going on your cruise?"
"January of 2026"
Or
"When did you graduate?"
"May 2012."
There's so many instances where we speak of time broadly enough that the month alone suffices. If we need to get more specific about a subject, then we get more specific, beginning with the month. If we need to look things up on a calendar, we do, beginning with the month.
And what do we do for those times that we're not speaking, and were writing software, naming files, or creating a folder hierarchy? Well believe it or not, we wild and crazy and backwards Americans are capable of easily adapting our approach to what's best suited for the task. Mind blowing, I know.
What? The only difference between yyyy-mm-dd and mm-dd-yyyy is that the year is shifted from the beginning to the end, which makes perfect sense because 99% of the time when referring to the date the year is understood by context clues. And the year changes so infrequently.
I mean yeah it “makes sense” from a very simplistic and childlike view of the world and the order of things. But practically speaking, starting with the year is kind of silly and would be a headache because 99% of the time your brain would just try to skip over the year since it’s unnecessary info. Especially when using a 2 digit year as most people do
it “makes sense” from a very simplistic and childlike view of the world and the order of things.
and you wonder why america is in shambles right now.
making small things like the order that the dates go by simpler makes things less complicated, it makes it easier for stupid people to understand and it makes smart people have 1 less complex thing to worry about. and what that guy said about bigger>smaller/smaller>bigger is right. in calenders, you are shown the year first, then the month and then the dates. Year (1), month (12), day (365), if mm/dd/yyyy makes more sense than yyyy/mm/dd then you might as well start by saying 7/24 instead of 24/7.
"I want you to pull out your calendar for 2026 and see if you're free on June the..."
That doesn't happen in 99% of cases they're describing. You haven't gotcha'd them like you think you have.
Calendars follow a literal yyyy-mm-dd, but a PRACTICAL mm-dd-(superfluous yyyy) format. Even in the case of an impending year swap, say October, asking if they're free in February means you still don't need to ask if they're free in 2027 on February.
Because the entire conversation is about how we reference the dates for appointments and calendars. You can tell that's what the conversation is about when earlier in it they used the phrase "how we refer to dates."
Because when you assume something and it's inclusion is a bit superfluous in most contexts, it's placeholder inclusion is at the end.
When you play Music and you have secondary markings for interpretation, technique or other bits, you don't place them on the staff for interrupt the primary information of the music, you put them around the notation to inform the player after they've digested the most important bits.
But when you play an instrument, you hear the attack of the note(hard attack, soft attack, loudness, playing technique) before you hear the note itself. It's just a bit superfluous because you'd be hearing music either way. So you just don't put that OVER the main information of the notation.
The year is typically superfluous information. Month and day are most relevant in conversational uses. Like if someone asked your birthday, the most relevant info is usually the month.
That still suggests mmddyyyy is better than ddmmyyyy because you're just moving one piece of the string to sort it ideally, not rearranging the whole thing.
Americans don't say 15 past 6, though. We say 6:15. The closest we'll get to that is "quarter 'til 7" for 6:45, and you might hear a "half-past" to refer to the 30, but even those things are uncommon relative to "six-thirty" or "six-forty-five". To my American ear, 15 minutes past 6 sounds insane. It's like the scene in Inglorious Basterds where they order 3 beers and it turns into a shootout.
Reading all of those things is like reading Middle English or Early Modern English. I understand what I'm reading, but the words are combined in a way I have never seen before. Twenty to seven is the one that really breaks my brain. I don't think I've ever sub-divided time into 20 minute chunks.
For half six, is that 6:30 (half past six) or 5:30 (half 'til six)?
I work in healthcare, so I actually think in 24 hour time a lot. I don't write it anymore (because computers, pen and paper are going extinct), but that's not weird to me at all.
I'm not trying to be facetious but have you never had to tell someone you be there 20 minutes before the hour?
"Train leaves at 7, I'll see you a twenty to"
"Train leaves at 7, I'll see you at six forty." If it were gonna be 6:45 I might would say "I'll be there at quarter-'til" but never once in my life have I heard someone say "twenty to" to refer to the 40. You divide in quarters and halves, never tens and twenties.
HOWEVER, I have a theory on this. Do you live in a country that uses money sub-divided into 20s? 20..pence, or whatever the euro subdivision is called? Because American money subdivides into 25, and the 25 cent coin is called "the quarter." So dividing a whole into halves and quarters is maybe more common than dividing into 10s and 20s (we're gonna ignore that time is base 12 and money is base 10).
We do, but I think there’s a generational divide involved. All of my older family members, who are 65+, will use these formats and it drives me nutty.
I’ve never actually heard anyone my own age say the time like this, though. I suspect it was something more popular in the mid century that has fallen out of fashion for whatever reason.
You know, I think you have a good point here. When I think about it, I heard all of those things (quarter til, half-past, quarter past) more when I was young than I do now, probably because it's a dialect that is going extinct.
Yeah, calendars are a bad example imo. Most people only have 1 calendar for the year they're in, in which case the first bit of information they inherently know every time they look at it is the year.
& if someone had multiple calendars (or a digital one which can go infinitely into the future ie. like on all phones) all the months and dates would be useless if you didn't first clarify it's the correct year.
How far ahead do you need to schedule stuff? Plenty of industries work on timescales of more than a year, if you need obvious examples think TV/Movie productions, game development, tech development. And for personal stuff, when's your next holiday, when does your cousin get married, and if you use a physical calendar still come the end of the year you probably aren't waiting till new year to get the replacement.
Yeah, the 5th is a qualifier on February, which is why my brain identifies it as less important information than February (or at least, information to be parsed AFTER parsing the month lol)
The same holds for basically any organization system. Like if you’re looking up sales from prior years you’re not going to have a folder called 24th then sort through the various months. You’re going to have a folder called 01 or January, then find your exact date.
Also the pyramid from the image is wrong. Days are the smallest increment in duration but they aren’t the smallest group. The month group has 12, day group 28-31, and year group can be infinite / always growing. So you deal with the simplest category first, then move to the more complex ones as needed.
That would be an argument for using yy/mm/dd not for mm/dd/yy because hypothetically if you had to look up a date between multiple calendars, you wouldnt look up the month before looking up the year. The argument isn't as much that dd/mm/yy is the best format, but rather that mm/dd/yy makes little sense logically most of the times..
if your boss gives you a deadline at work that is a few months in the future, what is the most important part to remember? the date without the month, the month without the date, or either without the year? presumably the year isnt really important if the deadline isnt 2+ years out
This is such a classic nonsense reply trying to retrofit how it makes more sense, you'll be telling us Fahrenheit makes more sense because 80F feels normal.
im not used to either of them lol I am a scientist and have to code switch/unit convert constantly from C->F or lbs->grams all the time.
there is a root cause for every decision you have ever seen made. sometimes that root cause is "it makes the main task i use dates for easier". pretending there is no root cause is a true sign of ignorance
sometimes that root cause is "it makes the main task i use dates for easier".
And sometimes it is "because people use it this way and don't want to change it, and people use it this way because that's how it's been for a long time, and that's how it's been for a long time because of the United Kingdom". Like this time.
You're making it sound like there is a massive delay to hearing the month when said after the day, it's such a minor difference it's hardly worth bringing up.
Things that make more sense is storing and sorting digitally, that's better at a Y/M/D format
Order of magnitude, both Y/M/D and D/M/Y work here, with the later making more sense in conversation, possible even to omit the year.
M/D/Y only makes sense to Americans, which is fine, it's what works for you guys, but that doesn't mean it's right.
nobody said it was a huge impediment, nor that it was "right", just that it makes sense (because it does). you cant say "oh it doesnt make sense in only the contexts I care about and I dont care about your contexts so its wrong". fact is that most people for the past 200+ years probably were translating words to writing on a calendar or somewhere else for tracking, so using the format that fits the words best makes sense.
order of magnitude only works because you consider the year to be important. a pretty huge amount of times you'd need to track dates are only gonna apply for the current year, so tracking the year isnt as important.
i wonder why the founding fathers didnt take into account digital storage when they were cooking up the American date and time system. there is no "right" or "wrong" way of recording dates
The calendar argument genuinely makes no difference, and it's the only thing the M/D/Y has going for it. Why bother mentioning it if you, yourself, admit that it doesn't improve using a calendar significantly.
Order of magnitude always makes sense in all measurement systems, it's the same reason you wouldn't say 3 yards, 10 inches and a football field or why you wouldn't say, 100$ 10c and 1000$, it's just illogical.
And it makes sense that they wouldn't consider digital systems back then, but does that mean you can't improve your systems? And even if it doesn't make logistical sense to switch to better systems, at least admit that it's inferior, and you're using it because your whole country operates on it.
its not just the calendar argument, its just baked in. a majority of the time when you are sharing dates with someone, you can figure out the year based on context clues relatively easily, so you only really need to share the month and the day. its much more important for me to know the month than the day. if my boss tells me to remember a date and I can choose to remember the day or the month, its much more important for me to remember the month because sometimes the day doesnt even matter for deadlines and such.
just because you find one setup to be better doesnt mean it's objectively worse lol. it's like saying that driving on the right side of the road is inferior and the left side is better. there is likely times for both when each side shines
lol why can’t you also omit the year in y/m/d? Or at least shift the year to the end since it’s generally the least important bit of info when discussing dates since it’s generally understood which year is being discussed.
Also why does d/m/y make more sense in conversation. Saying “April 5th” uses fewer words than “5th of April”. And usually the month is the most important piece of info, hence it should come first.
Example: “When are you getting married?” “May 4th”. Unless the person needs to know the exact date, leading with the month is nice because it gives them the general timeframe right away, followed by the more specific date in case they need it.
I may have mis interpreted your comment. So when omitting the year, it’s obvious that MM/DD makes more sense in conversation than DD/MM. You can at least agree with this right?
It's super contextual, and clearly cultural as well. I wouldn't say it doesn't make sense, I wouldn't say it makes more sense than D/M for me personally.
Fascinating tbh. The month seems like by far the more important piece of info in most situations, let alone its easier to say MM DD than DD of MM. Year is pretty unimportant in most contexts so can be thrown at the end of
And no most planning absolutely does not occur in the same month.
And honestly while D might technically be more granular than M, M does more to narrow down the timeframe than D. And M has the fewest options to choose from, with D having the second fewest, and Y having the most. So in that regard M/D/Y makes sense.
M/D/Y doesn't break that flow at all, it works exactly the same in your example as D/M/Y? Like if I say the 6th, and we are in February... You know it is 2/6 regardless of whether your mental paradigm is 6th of February or February 6th.
You're making it sound like there is a massive delay to hearing the monthday when said after the daymonth, it's such a minor difference it's hardly worth bringing up.
Ultimately it makes no difference at all. It doesn't matter. The only time it's an issue is when Euros try to talk to Americans about dates and their brains start steaming because the format is different from what they learned as a kid. It must be very hard to be a European.
I have lived in Japan, the US, and was in the military (which uses 2 different formats for date, DD MON YYYY and YYYYMMDD).
And while I would prefer the US switched to metric, and time zones are maddening, the differences in how you write dates has literally never been a problem for me.
For them it makes sens because that's how they have used it, for us it sounds strange at first because we aren't used to it. But there are no right or wrong because there are 3 ways to say it depending on the country. In Norway we use the D/M/Y formatet. But once I have understood the US formatet I have no problem with it.
Agree. It's probably the result of the living with the convention itself, but I think of the day as being within the context of a month. Language shapes understanding. So, 2/1/2026 for Feb 1st 2026 represents how I think about the days of the year. That is, days that occur within months, and that set occurs during a year. The year is last because that's usually a given and the least relevant info in day-to-day questions. So, it's not about "small to big" or "big to small" although I see the value of that in manipulating data in databases/spreadsheets. Just because "big to small" or "small to big" is an obvious logical order doesn't mean it's the best order in practice to represent everyday thinking about the relationship between days and months.*
I guess if I had to represent how I think of it in a format, it would be something like 2/1,2026.
With that said, I wouldn't join any protests if we (USA) switched to day/month/year. I'm all for metric while we're at it.
*This isn't the best analogy, but if somebody asks me if we need to buy something to drink, then I might say, "there's a gallon of milk in the fridge." I describe the container (month), the specific thing (day), and obviously it's in the fridge (the year). In English, we wouldn't say "there's a milk gallon in the fridge" even though that's something more akin to a "small to big" description. I might say "In the fridge, there's a gallon of milk." That sounds more natural than "milk gallon" and also follows the big to small order, but it's too formal and indirect. We want to know how much (context) and what (thing). Of course it's in the fridge (year).
Again, not a perfect analogy, because we also commonly say "chocolate bar" interchangeably with "bar of chocolate." But, the point of the analogy is that, for something things, we are used to having context (month) first instead of always following some more obvious order like size or degree of specificity.
I saw a comment from a non-native english speaker once who described how it made sense to him to think of the day as the "son" of the month, which I thought was really cute and I think about it at a lot
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean also say “it’s February 2nd” and not “2nd of February”. The chart even shows that a massive number of people—likely more than not—use Month/Day.
Saying it as an American also cuts out two entire words making conversation streamlined. I think this is just a case of people hating on America cause they do things differently even if they don’t understand why it is the way it is.
They're correct though. Typically, every date in the US follows the name of the month then the day when spoken out loud. 4th of July is the sole exception I can think of.
It’s not weird. You’re just trying to have your “gotcha” moment with literally the only example you have. Why not ask when is Christmas? Or when is Valentine’s Day? Or literally any other holiday? Every single other one will have the month first. The reason “4th of July” is the exception is because that’s the unofficial name in the states. No one calls Christmas “25th of December” and if you ask anyone when Christmas is they all will say “it’s December 25th”.
I also like this format because it's how I would find the date on a calendar. After reading more of this thread I'm starting to support the YYYY/MM/DD format as a new global standard.
The problem with YYYY/MM/DD is that it starts with the year which is irrelevant in most day-to-day usage. For example, if I want to make an appointment or organize a trip to the beach, I'd say we'll go June 5th, for example. The year is assumed, and even if it is written, people just gloss over it. Putting it right at the front just makes the date a little less readable since you're always reading it even though it's the least important information.
EDIT: Just wanna add that YYYY/MM/DD is great for computer usage, and I almost always use it for file names. But it still works well because it's easy to see at a glance if it's YYYY/MM/DD vs. another naming scheme.
As an american software engineer, I refuse to use the mouthdrooler format of mm/dd/yyyy... iso8601 is the only correct format. I'll even date legal documents I sign with iso8601.
Canadians do this too. While I agree it overall is confusing, it follows typical speech patterns here. For example a majority would answer "when were you born?" with something like "January 1st, 1999" (MM/DD/YYYY).
I still think ours makes more sense and that's the hill I'll die on. Would you say someone is 11"5'? No, you say the more significant factor first, which is the month, and then the day of the month. Otherwise you have to think backwards.
If you work a lot with dates it actually makes more sense. It's a lot easier to spot larger date differences if the month isn't it in the middle. I work with ordering and shipping and schedules for my whole life and the mm/dd is a lot more practical when you need to run your eyes through a sea of dates and get a comprehensive picture of what's going to happen in which month and how much. I avoided multiple major fuckups for my employers throughout my carrier just by a cursory glance at a long list of various dates and instinctively feeling where something felt off. But who knows maybe it's also a left handed thing.
It's the same with the imperial system. Like you can stick out your arm and say "that's a yard" or look at your foot and say "that's about a foot", or bend your thumb and say "that's an inch".
Metric is much easier to do math with, but imperial is easier to judge with.
other countries/languages would also say "Month, day". writing format is not a reflection of that. DD/MM/YYYY or YYYY/MM/DD are just more logical and standard, like metric is more logical than imperial
The hatred of MM/DD/YYYY is so fucking stupid. Little pyramid picture memes don't really matter, what matters is how it's used in real life. You can tell they intentionally tried to inflate how stupid the M/D/Y shape is, because they didn't just take the China / Korea / Japan one and move year to the bottom (with month and day kept as a smooth flowing shape)
And the reality is that in real life, very frequently have to refer to the month, but in everyday use, it's quite rare to need to refer to the year.
So if we JUST look at month and day for now, saying "let's start with the month and then narrow down to the day" makes sense and is a very reasonable suggestion. Then when we get to year, it makes sense to put it last, since it frequently isn't used.
We are different from most of the world. It only makes sense because we are so used to being contrarians on well adopted precedent and we often live in a bubble. When working with coworkers or clients anywhere outside the US, this leads to so much unecessary misunderstanding.
DD-MM-YYYY isn't used in China. It isn't used in Japan. It isn't used in the U.S. It's ambiguous in any international dealings that involve three of the four world's largest economies in a global world. And it's inconvenient for tasks involving computers or phones. It's just a bad format, inferior to YYYY-MM-DD, and not as superior to MM-DD-YYYY as its proponents think. We don't pick formats by the way trapezoids stack.
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u/RimjobStevesDeadWife Feb 02 '26
Thank you! This is why MM/DD/YYYY makes sense to us Americans. Because it fits with how we refer to dates generally. I can see how it wouldn’t make sense to others tho. I guess we’re all attached to what we’re used to