You’d think something as common and important as writing dates would be standardized by now. And in fact it is, ISO 8601 sets the international standard for writing dates as YYYY-MM-DD.
However, as the map above shows, that format is not commonly used outside of East Asia. Instead you have all sorts of different formats being used. The most common is the exact opposite of ISO 8601 and goes Day-Month-Year. This makes a certain amount of logical sense, as you’re going from the shortest to longest unit of time.
The United States of course has to be different and instead uses Month-Day-Year when writing dates. While from a logical point of view it makes no sense to write the date this way, it’s how most North Americans would say the date out loud. E.g. You’re much more likely to say January 31st, 2015 than you are the 31st of January, 2015.
But at least the US is generally consistent in its formatting. South Africa and Kenya both commonly use Year-Month-Day and Day-Month-Year, which while not ideal is unlikely to cause much confusion.
Saudi Arabia and the Philippines, on the other hand, use Day-Month-Year and Month-Day-Year, which could easily lead to confusion. For example is the following date: 05-06-2015, June 5th, 2015 or May 6th, 2015? Without knowing which system the other person is using, it’s impossible to tell just by looking.
Finally, Canada, due perhaps to its English-French divide, is a total mess using not 1, not 2 but 3 separate systems. Ironic, since Canadian Sir Sandford Fleming is the father of standard time zones. So if you’re visiting Canada best to get the date written down using words rather than numbers, just to be safe.
You can learn more about time and dates from the following books:
- The Dance of Time: The Origins of the Calendar
- How Do You Measure Time? (Measure It!)
- Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time
Have you ever been confused by a different dating format when traveling abroad? Let us know what happened in the comment section below:
Stuart says
I read ‘different dating format’ and thought yes, American girls are much more direct!
James Bassdrop says
Yep, as a Canadian this drives me insane to no end… my own personal preference is YYYY-MM-DD because it stays in chronological order when sorted alpha-numerically, but at this point I’d even be fine with Roman numerals or morse code as long as everybody was committing to doing it in the same format.
Jack says
That’s how I name files when I store them. It seems more practical.
Jeff Hurst says
Consider #1World1Date1Day
005/15/2018
15.005.2018
2018-005-15
2018/15/005
#dd #MM #0MM #yyyy
Peter says
And then we can add the time element, 12 hour or 24 hour, plus time zones. The military use 24 hour time and time zone Z, which is UST or GMT.
Laci says
Hungary indeed uses YMD and was very strict on this before the arrival of computers, and somewhat still (a MDY can occur in not entirely translated computer programs, just like in any other country).
Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Ukraine, Croatia: I agree that DMY is used, except for the 2 million Hungarians living there and steadfastly sticking to YMD when writing/speaking Hungarian. Well, that’s ISO standard, so good to keep it, even after joining the EU where there is a large consensus about a non-ISO DMY and there aren’t many such exceptions in the whole Europe. Programatically it is less convenient to iput the day first, let’s say 29, and when you get to the month and year, it turns out you mean 29 february 2022, which doesn’t exist.
Luis says
It shoulda be Universal Standard.
Robert OWEN says
Another format, which is now fairly rare, used to be pretty common for European postmarks. It uses an Arabic numeral for the day, a Roman numeral for the month, and then an Arabic numeral again for the year. So today’s date, 24 September 2024 would be expressed as: 24.IX.24 . I think it is still used upon occasion for international meetings and conferences.