4 ms·
Because Americans use slashes commonly in Y/D/M
by shreddit 1y ago
Because Americans use slashes commonly in Y/D/M
- hnbad 1y agoWait, I thought Americans use M/D/Y not Y/D/M?
- silisili 1y agoWe do, almost exclusively. We'll use Y/M/D for systems or ordering, sometimes. I can't recall having ever seen Y/D/M used in any notable sense.
- chungy 1y agoThis is correct, the most common short-hand format in America is MM/DD/YYYY (possibly two digits in the last group). Dates like 05/28/2025 and 28/05/2025 are unambiguous enough to deal with order differences, dates like 06/03/2025 are not. Year first and dashes is pretty much exclusively YYYY-MM-DD, no ambiguity; 2025-03-06 cannot be interpreted in any manner other than "the sixth day of the third month of the year 2025"
- apricot 1y agoOP is probably little-endian.
- torben-friis 1y agoUh, TIL. As a non American it was known to me that Americans use the YDM format but I had no idea slashes vs dashes carried meaning for that.
- thrdbndndn 1y agoDo they? I think the US use MDY mostly and sometimes YMD.
- floydnoel 1y agothey don’t really, at least not in any universal sense. in the military (marine corps) we always used YMD with slashes. i would say that in non-military contexts, dashes are seen with YMD more frequently. but dashes or slashes are used for both YMD and MDY and there's no legal rule or regulation nor requirement to use one or the other. some people just pattern match quickly and assume too much based on that.
- thrdbndndn 1y agoI'm not American but I lived in the US for 10 years. I had never seen Y/D/M. I almost never see American use Day/Month order to begin with, let alone Y/D/M.
- binarymax 1y agoNo we don’t. I’m American and I’ve never seen this format.
- skissane 1y agoYDM is very rare; according to Wikipedia, only found in Kazakhstan, Latvia, Nepal, and Turkmenistan, and even in those countries it commonly coexists with other formats. I believe internationally that YMD and DMY are the two most common formats (and also the most logical), and the (much less logical) MDY comes third… YDM is a very distant fourth. MYD, DYM are theoretically possible but doubt anybody uses them Actually, although MDY is by far most common in the US, I’ve seen US federal government forms that use DMY instead (although I imagine that’s rare, I’m sure you’ll find DMY US govt forms are greatly outnumbered by MDY ones)
- madcaptenor 1y agoI can't even see how someone could get to a format with the year in the middle. In uses where you don't need to specify the year you might use either MD or DM, and when adding the year you could put Y either on the front or back of either of those.
- shreddit 1y agoMy apologies to all Americans, of course i meant M/D/Y, i just got it backwards