why do americans do month-day-year instead of day-month-year

It does my head in.

The American military has always used day/month/year such as today is 20 February 2006. The way civilians in the US write dates can be very confusing if if the day of the month is less than 12.

Why do you do day/month/year? :thinking: hehe

Just the way I was always taught, :shrug:
Why dont we use the metric system? :shrug:

I have a problem working out when thing were done or made.

eg 6-4-2005

is the 6th day, of the 4th month

or the 6th month of the 4th day.

I think most of the world use day,month,year.

remember that space probe that was supposed to go into orbit around mars crashed into it because of a mixup between metric and imperial mesurments.

regards.

daBear said:

The American military has always used day/month/year such as today is 20 February 2006. The way civilians in the US write dates can be very confusing if if the day of the month is less than 12.

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I usually write dates 20 Feb 06 so not to cause confusion.

Because it mirrors conversational American English.

In American English, at least conversationaly, it's natural to say it that way, so it's often written that way.

"What's today's date?", she asked.

In reply, he said, "Oh, it's February twentieth, two-thousand and six."

So that would be written as: Feb. 20, 2006, or 2/20/06.

I think the reasoning is that for at least the first 28 days of each month, all twelve months have a 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. so by putting the month first, you're immediately eliminating the question: "Which 20th is it?" In essence it's using the month as a adjective to the day. It's like saying: "A red apple."In English, putting certain adjectives behind the noun without a modifier or pronoun is awkward, it's like trying to say "A apple red."

It's not unusual to say it day, month, year, either, but it's not quite as common.

"In reply, he said, "Oh, it's the twentieth of February, two-thousand and six." but you have to have the pronoun "of" in the sentence to link the adjective of the month to the primary noun of the numbered date. Of course, this isn't entirely accurate, as you could pick any portion of the date as the primary noun, such as using the year with day and month as the modifying adjectives too...

Anyway, that would write as: 20, Feb. 2006, or 20-2-06. Putting the date first in purely abbreviated or numeric notation might seem subconciously awkward to American English speakers since the "of" that can be there when written or spoken isn't there in purely numeric form.

If you hunt around in American documents and literature or computers, you'll find both formats, but month-first seems to dominate in the common parlance.

day-month-year: a logical progession from smallest to largest time unit. But, hey, that's just me - I'm a supporter of SI.

My mother uses roman numerals for the month (but still the day-month-year sequence) - that's how she learned it. :thinking:

Those of us that do simple computer time math prefer year month day.

20051201 is definitely less than 20060101, so it's easy to do that way.

Most time calculations are done by converting to the nmber of seconds since a common starting point. Then it's easy to add or subtract days, weeks and months.

I think the US does mmddyy for reasons of convention. You pick one and stick with it and everyone will know. The downfall is that it IS ambiguous with few ways to tell when it's reversed.

Daniel

gadget_lover said:

20051201 is definitely less than 20060101, so it's easy to do that way.

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Agree, I use that format to store my chronologically-relevant research data. It does follow a logic progression, from largest to smallest time unit (and it sorts appropriately by computers), whereas the month-day-year breaks that progression. :green:


How many bushels are there in a chain 3oz and 21/32"?
:laughing:

if sombody asks you the date the chances are that they will mean the day, because likely they will know the month, and unless their from another planet, or been in a coma, will definitely know the year.

if somebody asked you the date and you said feburary, you would think they were daft.

regards.

Things here in Canada (where we do use the metric system) were still never clear. I beleive the banks were having trouble with cheques, and not knowing whether the person intended the date to be DMY or MDY. I think that most banks within the last few months have changed their cheques to indicate clearly the preferred method of dating.

ISO 8601 is the only way to go.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html

gadget_lover -

Don't you just love it when you are having to deal with legacy data and finally realize that the 040305xxxx file is from April the 3rd, 2005 instead of March the 5th, 2004?

Data files and unique ID incrementers should be yyyy/mm/dd not mm/dd/yy. I've been known to say curtly, "Don't use mama dada yaya!" I don't mind if mm/dd/yyyy is used in a GUI and associated records just not the file names or unique IDs.

All of my science courses were in feet, inches, pounds, and Fahrenheit until college. Then everything was meters, liters, Celsius, grams, and day-month-year.

Some have defined "convention" as the practice of making the same mistake every generation in the name of tradition.

:laughing: I prefer to quote Abe Simpson: [size=-1]"My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I like it!" :laughing:
[/size]

It really got confusing when I worked as a Systems Analyst for so long and dates were YY/MM/DD for date stamp comparisions and generally used that way, or had to be broken up and rearraged before being put in files, sometimes figuring out which came first for splitting up was notalways easy depending upon the information source. Which of course led to the whole Y2K freakout. We always joked we wanted to be retired before we had to go in and rewrite all the systems to accomdate a 4 digit year, so it was WELL know it was going to happen years and years before.

I suppose if your working on material over one year old, say an archive.

you would want to go to the year then the month and final the day.

regards.

BentHeadTX said:

I usually write dates 20 Feb 06 so not to cause confusion.

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I'm a Credit Union Manager and in banking (can you say Credit Unioning?) we also use this convention. How long we've had someone's money or how long they've had ours is kinda important.

To confuse matters, when doing database querries it's yyyymmdd...most of the time.

-F

Yes, I hate it icebreak. There's a concept of embedding information into file names, strings and labels that appears to be a natural tendancy. I've seen lots of data embedded into file names. Sometimes it's OK, like the version of a program patch. More often than not, there should have been an identifier IN the file and the file name should have just been unique with no real significance.

Slightly off topic:

I've worked at places that use complex naming structures for their computers based on all sorts of things.

sf01po1 Was San Francisco Location 1, Production Oracle system number 1. This broke, of course, when the machine moved, was reused or had added functionality. It also broke when a new manager insisted that development machines needed "dev" inserted in the middle. Sheesh!


Daniel

Then there is the custom of some countries using "," as a decimal point; we use "." in the U.S. In the U.S. "," is used to separate thousands, millions, etc. when writing numbers.

Where else uses "."?

TinderBox (UK) said:

Why. . .

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Because. . .