How should the date be written

[iff]

Today for example, I would go 19th January 2019

 

The day month year is my normal way

 

One exception is typing file name where I go year month day in digits and this I find helps finding files on file explorer

 

When typing digits, i use dashes

[NickyTannock]

Voted.

[Quacks]

I'd usually write it dd/mm/yy cause it's quicker than writing it out fully 

[Bio 7]

Not sure what question 5 means by dashes, is it / ? Because to me thats a slash and a dash is the same as a hyphen - .

 

Anyway date is   19/01/2019

 

I hate it with the month first, what is the point of it and why don’t we standardise it. I have to check if the middle is above 12 to work out if it’s the proper version or not, and it doesn’t always work that way.

[iff]

9 minutes ago, Bio 7 said:

Not sure what question 5 means by dashes, is it / ? Because to me thats a slash and a dash is the same as a hyphen - .

 

I've edited to make it clearer what I meant. 

 

I do mean /

[AndrewT]

I feel most people to fill this in are UK/Euro,

 

I'm guessing the Americans wont agree with the correct way

 

 

DD/MM/YYYY

[Salmiakki]

Correct way to write the date: 19.1.2019 (day month year) 

[Ashmedai]

19/1/19 is my usual way. Some more official sorta things usually want full digits so 19/01/2019 for something like that.

[Homer]

DD.MM.(YY)YY

 

Making sense FTW

[SpaceDustbin]

dd-mm-yyyy

[Lunala]

19/1/19

 

I prefer day, month, year in that order - smallest (day) to biggest (year).

Month/day/year just doesn't feel right because it's not in the right order and is therefore weird to me

[Ortac]

Considering the standard way of writing the date varies from country to country, most people are just going to favour whatever is the standard way of writing the date in their country.

 

I am not suggesting it is happening here (at least not so far), but I personally don't like silly spats or arguments over what is right and what is wrong, because as far as I am concerned, if an American says mm-dd-yyyy, that is correct, and if a European says dd-mm-yyyy, that is also correct. 

 

It only really matters when communicating internationally and making sure that there is no misunderstanding or confusion. When I was in a job where I routinely had to communicate with colleagues in the USA by e-mail, we always made sure when writing dates that we wrote the name of the month in full and not as a number to make sure that there were no miscommunications.

 

When saving and naming multiple files on a computer which get rolled forward and contain the date in the name, I like to use the yyyy-mm-dd format, as that way when the files are sorted alphabetically, they are also in date order. 

[Guest]

2019-01-19 if I write out the whole thing, 19-01-2019 works too but doesn't look as good (+ it's harder to put things in order if you start with the day instead of the year).

 

Then again it depends a bit on where I'm writing this, if it's a normal conversation I will probably say the full name of the month and add th/rd/nd/st to the day.

[TheAP]

I may have misunderstood the question, but I usually would say or write the date as, say, January 19, 2019. But when using all numbers, I think day/month/year would be clearer.

[RoseGoesToYale]

I normally do month day year, so today would be 1/19/19. But if I wanted to be fancy it'd be 19.1.19.

[Kitteη χ]

I would write today's date in one of the following forms:

 

1-19-19

1-19-2019

19 January 2019

January 19, 2019

[deltaX]

I prefer day month year, but usually write it if I'm using all month day year instead so I don't m fellow Americans.

[Ennis]

3 hours ago, Bio 7 said:

why don’t we standardise it

Probably because we'd have to rechristen 9/11 as 11/9.

I think it would be a good idea though because 9/11 (9th November) is actually the so-called "day of fate" of Germany because so many important historic events took place on that date.

 

Anyway, let's just all agree on day/month/year, celsius and the metric system.

[Divide By Zero]

I work as a software developer and I've always found it interesting how everyone has their own idea of what the correct date format should be. So one person might request a report with the date spelled out (e.g. January 1, 2019) and someone else might want a report with the date in short format (e.g. 01-01-19). Sometimes there are so many different date formats used in one system that everyone gets confused.

[Bio 7]

1 hour ago, Tuple said:

I work as a software developer and I've always found it interesting how everyone has their own idea of what the correct date format should be. So one person might request a report with the date spelled out (e.g. January 1, 2019) and someone else might want a report with the date in short format (e.g. 01-01-19). Sometimes there are so many different date formats used in one system that everyone gets confused.

Thus let’s have the correct format for shortening it be dd/mm/yyyy

 

Allowing more than one complicates things for no reason.

[daveb]

I won't tell other people what format they should use, or say which ones are right or wrong. As an American I am used to the format we use here. If I'd grown up with a different format I'm sure I'd be just as used to whatever format that was. There are some good arguments for standardizing the format around the world, and good arguments for which formats are logical or useful. Sometimes, for example, I find it more useful to know which month is being referred to before I care about which day (but that's just one isolated example; similar examples could be made for most or all other formats).

 

For now, I'm content to use the American format in American contexts, such as when writing out checks. And using clearer or more explicit formats when that makes communication clearer.  

[Zinerva]

 I have always of assumed that dashes are for the system where months are first.

Here the most common way is 19.1.2019 or 19. January 2019 (the dot meaning the same as st/nd/th in our local format). Note that leading zeros are usually only used in online forms and such.

[Goonie]

it depends on the audience and what sort of document it is.

 

mine varies all over the place as far as formatting goes

[LauraGarnham]

On 1/19/2019 at 1:33 PM, iff said:

Today for example, I would go 19th January 2019

 

The day month year is my normal way

 

One exception is typing file name where I go year month day in digits and this I find helps finding files on file explorer

 

When typing digits, i use dashes

I do the exact same

[HonoraryJedi]

On 1/19/2019 at 4:31 PM, TheAP said:

I may have misunderstood the question, but I usually would say or write the date as, say, January 19, 2019. But when using all numbers, I think day/month/year would be clearer.

In my native language, it is more natural to say "the nineteenth of January, 2019", same order as how we write dates. And that transfers to how I use English also. I always thought month-day-year is really weird, but I suppose it makes a little sense if that is how people naturally say the date.

To me, the details don't matter so much as long as it is some form of day-month-year. With year-month-day being useful for sorting files.

[Guest]

There should be a fourth part where you estimate how much time you have before you think you will die. 

[Crazy Cat Lady]

My most common way of writing the date would be

Jan. 20/19

[Crazy Cat Lady]

On 1/19/2019 at 5:45 AM, Bio 7 said:

I hate it with the month first, what is the point of it and why don’t we standardise it. I have to check if the middle is above 12 to work out if it’s the proper version or not, and it doesn’t always work that way. 

My preference is month first because that's the way we say it (at least here in Canada - at least where I grew up in Saskatchewan and where I live now in Alberta) and in English).

 

I agree, though, when it's all numbers, and the number is below 13, it's hard to know if that's the day or month first. (It's also why I prefer to write out - abbreviated form or otherwise - the month.)

[everywhere and nowhere]

I'm a little disoriented by the details, but I know one thing: any order other than from smallest unit to largest (DMY) or from largest to smallest (YMD) is extremely confusing and should be avoided. Unfortunately, particularly in the U.S., unless I'm mistaken, putting the day between month and year is common. If day number is above 12, I can see which one is the day, but when I see something like "05/02/2017", how can I be sure if it's 5th of February or 2nd of May?

In Poland most people write the date as DMY, in Arabic numerals, and I always use Roman numerals instead for the month - which also means that I don't need separators. So most people would write the current date as "20.01.2019" and I as "10 I 2019". In my diary I write full month names.

Btw, I don't really like how a lot of European languages keeps old Roman month names. Polish has native names for months apart from "marzec" and "maj" (you can guess which ones they are), Ukrainian has 100% native month names. The case of French is disappointing... I'm not a fan of French Revolution because I support freedom, but not violence - however, it's a real pity that "revolutionary" month names such as thermidor, brumaire etc. were abandoned. They were too rooted in natural phenomena and it's just Much More Creative than repeating all that juillet = Julius, which is meaningless to us nowadays... I'm not saying that history is meaningless, that Roman empire was meaningless, but repeating Roman names over and over is uncreative.

[Suigin]

I've gotten used to this: 21.1.19