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Why do Americans write the month before the day?
- benparsons 13y agotldr: "dunno"
- seren 13y agoI find it mildly infuriating when an article is titled in a way you think you'll find an answer, and it is actually some rambling ending up saying we don't know...
- donkeyd 13y agoThis is because questions on hacker news are usually rhetorical.. This title is actually right on point, if there was an answer in the article it should have been: Why Americans write the month before the day.
- seren 13y agoThe real reason is that I guess less people would be clicking on "We don't know why Americans write the month before the day".
- kszx 13y agoIf there's one area where the rest of the world can learn from China, it's this: yyyy-mm-dd.
- alwaysdoit 13y agoYeah, it's weird that people try to justify being completely backwards by pointing at someone who's half-backwards. YYYY-MM-DD is the only way that makes any real sense.
- RooBadley 13y agoAnyone who has ever organized a file system by date knows that yyyy-mm-dd is the only way to go.
- micheljansen 13y agoUntil I read this article, I never realised where the term "endianness" came from: "...computer scientists got their inspiration for the term 'endianness' from Jonathan Swift's 1726 epic Gulliver’s Travels. In the fictional kingdom of Lilliput people have to open their soft-boiled eggs at the small end (it's a royal decree). While in Blefuscu, eggs are cracked from the other end. Lilliputians are small-endians while Blefuscudians are big-endians."
- someperson 13y agoWow it turns out the author of the article pulled that factoid along with his next accompanying quote straight Wikipedia! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Etymology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Etymology And the second half of the article is a Google autocomplete screenshot. The article is complete fluff!
- enscr 13y agoWhen I'm arranging my photographs in folders, I prefer yyyy-mm-dd. That way it stays in chronological order. However for casual reference, when year is not needed, I find dd-mm more intuitive. I guess it has something to do with reading from left to right... at a glance, it's just easier to comprehend. I've always found mm-dd a bit odd to use.
- timdoug 13y agoIt's an international standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
- SideburnsOfDoom 13y agoThere are two ways to send dates across the wire as text between different systems: 1) ISO 8601 2) A world of hurt Source: experience. Not using the standard invites things to break, but only on a some machines, and only on or after the 13th of the month. Of course the data for the first few days of the month will be present, just wrong.
- NickNameNick 13y agoAnd always - always - always in UTC.
- ygra 13y agoAnd sadly there are still things that insist on using the second option. RFC 2822 used in MIME (historical oddity because it pre-dates ISO 8601), UNIX timestamps as either seconds or milliseconds (at work we have one instance where numbers > 32 bit are serialized as a hex string in JSON, which includes such a millisecond-UNIX-epoch timestamp), etc. Slightly related insanity: Using localtime (i.e. not UTC) for log timestamps. And then having fun once a year dissecting the one hour that has twice as many messages.
- hessenwolf 13y agoIt's annoys me that the time format with colons means I cannot use it for file names. What do you use instead?
- V-2 13y agoI always wondered why Americans wouldn't read $23,428.32 as "twenty-three thousand dollars thirty-two cents and four hundred and twenty-eight dollars"
- memracom 13y agoMore interesting is how people read $1,534 Is it one thousand, five hundred and thirty four dollars? Or fifteen hundred and thirty four dollars? Or even one and a half thousand and thirty four dollars? All of these forms are used in some countries/languages.
- NickNameNick 13y agoFrench phone numbers are the worst...
- evincarofautumn 13y agoThe article doesn’t actually answer the question. The month-day-year date format was commonly used in the UK until the 1920s or so, simply because it matches a common order of spoken dates: December (the) sixteenth, 2013. Presumably, Americans just retained the older form while Britain moved on; a similar thing happened with the rhotic General American accent. (No, I don’t have a citation on hand.)
- mooism2 13y agoAlthough if you or anyone else could come up with a citation, I'd love to read it.
- ksec 13y agoSounds like a possible reason and explanation. Thx.
- gabemart 13y ago> simply because it matches a common order of spoken dates I'm a native British English speaker and I would say "16th of December" more often than "December 16th".
- nodata 13y agoI thought it was because, to an American at least, the month was most important, then where you are in the month, then the obvious part (the year).
- eyko 13y ago
- someperson 13y agoI have assumed it was a literation of the way it's often spoken: "January 1st 1980" vs "the first of January 1980" Article should really have had a discussion of the possible reasons though
- aycangulez 13y agoIt occured to me that having the month before the day is the most practical solution because the most important piece in a date is the month as years change only every 365 days or so, and a day gains meaning only when associated with a month. In other words, the month, being the most salient piece comes first.
- alexeisadeski3 13y agoGet your logic out of here. We're hating on America.
- interpol_p 13y agoI disagree that the most important information is the month — it really depends on context. Most dates I work with are near the present day. Scheduling something next week, referring to last week. Very rarely do I exceed the current month unless I am near a month boundary. The current month is nearly always known information. In this case, the day is the first piece of information I look for (and almost always when I want to know today's date, all I am really asking for is "what day of the month are we on today?").
- jonhuber 13y agoI couldn't have said it better myself. I moved to Australia a while back, and I find trying to scan dates on Australian sites infuriating, especially for apartment listings. 11/02/13 12/03/13 15/02/13 14/03/13 So disappointing when you realize the apartment isn't available until next month.
- gmac 13y agoThat seems a bit contrived. Whether the month is most salient depends on the context. And (as a European) I'm constantly amazed by how weird and confusing it is to put the middle-level information up front. If there were different separators (e.g. if today were 12,16/2013) I think I'd struggle less.
- sacado2 13y agoWhat about timestamps from that logic ? I think there, hour is the most important datum, then month, then day, as you state it. Minutes come after that. Year is not that relevant, and seconds are very secondary. So, my comment is written at 11-12-16:59-2013:10 GMT+1. Not very readable for sure, but much more practical ;)
- memracom 13y agoI think that it is as simple as how people say and write dates in full. In the USA people say July fourth most of the time, but in the UK people say the first of May more often. And the year is often not necessary in spoken communication. Especially in daily business where most talk is about short term deadlines "I promised Fred we would deliver by the 4th of June". Probably if you dig deep enough you will find that some printer of calendars (maybe even preceding Ben Franklin) just happened to print with the month first on every page and that was enough of a tipping point.
- dingaling 13y ago> In the USA people say July fourth most of the time Most of the USians with whom I work say 'Fourth of July'! But then proceed to write it 'backwards'.
- jonhuber 13y agoYes, but most wouldn't say 2nd of July or 3rd of July. I feel it is said that way because of the holiday status.
- Jongseong 13y ago'Fourth of July' is pretty much the exclusive form for the Independence Day of the U.S. and is an exceptional case. It is preceded by 'July third' and followed by 'July fifth'. Even other significant dates usually don't get special treatment, e.g. 'September Eleventh' or 'December Seventh'.
- alexeisadeski3 13y agoSame reason we say the hour before the minute?
- Zenst 13y agoI do know it is easier to validate input data in real-time. Once you have the month you know how many days the day will be maximum with the exception of leap years when you need to know the year as well. If you enter day then month you could enter a valid day like 31 and then if you enter 11 for November you then have an invalid date. Either way it is somewhat perplexing and now we have better data entry with the month in words as a drop down in many walks of apps which negate this possible nightmare of 10/11/13 being 10th of Novemeber 2013 or 11th of October 2013. I'm sure many of you have nightmare stories over this date format without even going into the nighmare known as TimeZones.
- ozh 13y agoAs always, relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1179/ http://xkcd.com/1179/
- midgetjones 13y agoA: They say "December sixteenth", rather than "the sixteenth of December", so they write it that way. It's still about as wrong as you can get though.
- seanccox 13y agoMy favorite part of the article is that the author failed to realize that 'Gullivers Travels' is a satire.
- gahahaha 13y agoI see from the article that people in the middle east write dd-mm-yyyy But they read right to left. So does that mean that they really write yyyy-mm-dd (like all sensible people should, I might add :-) but read it right to left or that they write dd-mm-yyyy and read it left to right?
- morgante 13y agoThis is why I just write everything in ISO_8601. My fellow Americans (excluding my CS colleagues) might think it's a little odd, but there's no room for confusion.
- ygra 13y agoI do the same in Germany and get a few odd looks as well. Strangely though, ISO 8601 was the only official date format here between 1995 and 2001. After that the old DD.MM.YYYY format was allowed again "if the context is unambiguous". I still get questions on why I fill out dates in forms in the sane format, though.
- hammadfauz 13y agoAlso, why do they not adopt the metric system of units? (A need to differentiate from the plebs in the rest of the world, perhaps?)
- abiro 13y agoIf you order dates within the same year, mm/dd makes more sense than dd/mm. That can be a reason for the American date format. In any case, yyyy/mm/dd makes the most sense.
- cpleppert 13y agoThis page has some pretty good ideas: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1t02dv/why_does_america_write_the_date_as_monthdayyear/ http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1t02dv/why_do... It probably has something to do with early typesetting where it was much easier to change the number without changing the month if the type was set left to right. This was true for both england and america with the advent of printing but seemed to stick in America possibly due to habit without having a manuscript tradition to fall back on.
- wordofchristian 13y agoNot only does China use the best date format but they also only have one time zone for the whole country and DON't practice DST (summer time). If only the whole world could adopt this policy it would solve a lot of headaches.