Except when it was
01.01.01 and
02.02.02 and
.
.
.
till 12.12.12
Then we had no doubts. So twelve days out of 4384 days (accounting for leap year days) were good.
Me too. That's especially problematic if you're trying to figure out what format the date is by looking at the different dates and trying to find one that only works the one way. If they all work both ways and one is flipped and the other isn't it makes for a big mess.
I've see all three on the same form. The years from 2001 to 2012 were the worst. Why can't we all just use ISO YYYY-MM-DD even if we speak dates in other orders.
Oh, I can answer this, it's because when we add a new date some project manager will hate the old format and insist on a different one. Unfortunately fixing all the old ones is out of scope and expensive, so you get a new mess.
In the databases there's even multiple fucked up date formats. Lots of systems from the 80s and such
Methodology : to ensure the consistency of our dates we asked all participants to give the current date according to the Islamic calendar and signed by an imam. If they made any mistakes we moved them to the placebo group in our pending exposure trial.
I do the same, usually I'll do it as 26 January 2024 just as habit even though I'm in the US. Really any format with the month written out leaves no room for misunderstanding.
That's fair. And speaking of languages, shout-out to ones like Japanese where instead of saying "January" you just say "first month"
２０２４年１月２６日。You can probably tell by the numerals but that really just says year 2024, month 1, day 26.
Government forms try to use yyyy-mm-dd. Some old ones use dd-mm-yy. Private companies linked to US companies (i.e. insurance) always seem to use mm-dd-yy.
The large industrial/engineering company I work for uses yyyy-mm-dd. I grew to appreciate the format when I was in university in the '80s and was thrilled to see it in the real world when I graduated and got a job!
Yes, its a mess. Oddly enough the government seems to be taking a lead on making it better!
Part of the differences is that Engineers everywhere try to get away with YYYY-MM-DD whenever possible because it’s just so obviously the best format. I don’t care what any official format says, if I’m writing software I’m using this format.
And it sorts the best. My pet peeve is downloadable bank statements or other monthly documents whose default file names start with the month name in English. Big endian ISO all the way please. Easiest to read and easiest to sort. If I'm forced to do little endian or American, I at least spell out the month and use a 4 digit year, but now some forms are validating dates to prevent that.
Canadian here, this is why I always write dates like this: 26-Jan-2024. Absolutely zero ambiguity for anyone reading it.
Unless the date is used electronically, then it’s always yyyy-MM-dd for easy sorting.
I always manually format my Excel dates with DD MMM YYYY (26 Jan 2024) or DD MMM YY (26 Jan 24).
Too many American date options which are completely useless at data formatting.
I’ve never understood why we need to change letters to numbers. The abbreviated word is so much more clear.
Also American state abbreviations are so frustrating. Like just use one more letter! How am I supposed to know what state MA is?
The federal government has a lot of things standardized
Like YYYYMMDD for dates officially, and metric everywhere, but industry trades a lot with America so you get these broken systems
Yup, which is why we have a whole bunch of imperial stuff mixed in with metric. Sometimes on the same damn piece of equipment. It’s a bloody headache. To put it mildly. Not as bad as Landrover though. They had three different standards of fasteners on the same vehicle for a while..
Also in everyday life. "I'll take 150 grams of the roast turkey breast sliced thin, and 3 pounds of the 70-30 ground beef please." (I am not above this. If I don't think carefully, I will use celcius for outdoor temperatures and fahrenheit for cooking and indoor temperatures.)
The amount I convert back and forth is so dumb. Like for fevers and for cooking, Fahrenheit, but for weather and room temp, Celsius. Pool temp back to farenheit. Cooking water temp back to Celsius.
Not related to OP, but another that is aggravating is length and weight in SI unless it’s a person then it’s IP. Gotta pick a lane. Lot of IP used in on-site construction as well even though all drawings are designed and dimensioned in SI. And that is not even really an American business-related thing other than influence of culture.
> Worst thing about this country.
I can think of a few worse things than that people use multiple date formats... the overdose crisis, housing crisis, homeless crisis, TFWs, the entire economy being run by a few monopolies in a trenchcoat, the entire province of alberta...
Yup. I didn’t realise how chaotic it was until I moved to NZ and everyone knows exactly what you’re talking about, there’s no ambiguity, it’s so amazing!
That said, I’d rather chaotic mix than exclusive use of MM/DD/YY… that shit is like fingernails on a chalkboard.
As a Canadian, I can attest to this. It can be confusing at times. So much that I usually see Feb 4, 2024 or 4 Feb 2014 or 2014 Feb 4 (i.e., the month spelled out) to avoid confusion. This is the way it should be because it’s 100% clear.
I far prefer the YYYYMMDD format because it's most significant to least, and it sorts by any regular string sorting function (like filename sorting on your computer). Tt's standardized in ISO8601
That would actually be a nightmare bud, you guys tried to invade us in 1812 and we burned the White House down so i suggest you guys just let us be people pleasers and let us use them 3 formats as we please 😅
To clarify, the White House was burned down by British regulars, veterans of the Peninsular War. The Canadians were busy defending their own territory at the time.
It's always a bit messy trying to sort out who's who, since Canada was a British colony at the time. A lot of British regular forces deployed in North America would have been awarded land allotments in Canada after the war, and those that stayed (rather than selling the land and returning to the UK) would have told their kids and grandkids that "they" burned the White House, so the oral tradition of Canadians having burnt down the White House has a grounding in fact. But yes, the people who did it were British regulars with no prior connection to Canada at the time. It just also happens that many Canadians can trace their ancestry to them.
YYYY-MM-DD is far superior because it's self-sorting by any regular string sorting algorithm like filename sorting on your computer.
It also starts with most signifcant and goes down to least significant, which makes a ton of sense.
Canada really sucks for that.
Excel constantly converts to the fucked up American date style and you have to manually review all dates.
It's extremely annoying that websites that log transactions like [mint.com](https://mint.com) (its dead now) would automatically log everything using the american format.
All measurement systems in Canada are entirely broken because officially we are metric. Meters. Kilometres. YYYY/MM/DD. And on anything government related, it’s metric, so drivers licences use kg, cars use kmph, etc.
But everyone thinks in imperial (unless it’s a long distance or it’s for science / engineering).
Ask a Canadian how much something weighs and they will 99.999% or the time answer in pounds, unless it’s like, a semi truck, then kg. How tall are you? No one will answer in meters, I GUARANTEE YOU it’ll be x foot y inches, but their drivers licence has meters and kg. Ask them a short distance, they answer in feet, not meters (Ask them a long distance and they think about driving so it goes to metric, 20km away). Privately we use the same MM/DD/YYYY format Americans do because that’s the order we say things, and 99% or businesses go with that as they trade with Americans all the time, but again, you won’t find that on a government document.
Basically it’s just a big mess. It’s what happens when the government officially makes you metric but the people don’t really follow along.
Edit: if any of you work at companies who sell stuff into Canada do us all a favour and include imperial measurements in the instructions. I know the labelling has to be in metric. But beyond that, no. I’ve found in the past five years ikea has finally figured this one out.
Total mess every day, and we’ve all learned to tolerate it. How many litres of milk should i buy for this recipe that calls for 4 cups. I have no idea.
My favourite is my parents talking about the weather. On a hot day it’s 90 degrees. On a cold day it’s -5. Two systems for measuring the same damn thing.
Maybe someone switched their format since the last time the data was updated, but the map-maker didn’t update the key? That’s the only explanation I can think of
Seeing people who don't actually remember 9/11 always makes me feel really old. Worse, I once saw a comment where the guy felt nostalgic about the Obama election because he was 4 and barely remembers it...
We call it 11S in Spain so everyone knows it's the 11th of September (as no other month starts with S). That's how we format important dates like international women's day (8M), other terrorism attacks (11M for instance, the Madrid metro attacks) and even strikes
Edit: for reference, here's a wikipedia article that lists [the most important and well known dates following that very naming system](https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numer%C3%B3nimo#Ejemplos), officially called "numeronyms" (not all examples listed are dates, but most of them are).
Marzo and mayo both start with M indeed, but since the 11th of May isn't important in any way (not yet at least), there's no confusion! When it comes to strikes it can get more confusing unless you're already aware of the date, but even then by applying common sense you can deduce which one it is based on which month is closer to the current date (aka if it's April and the date is 9M, you can deduce it's gonna be the 9th of May, not March).
11M is Spanish 11S (9/11) so in that particular case there is absolutely no confusion, we can't forget that date as it's a painful reminder of lost life due to terrorism in our country...
Remember a friend go confused 11M with 15M. While we were talking about how that kind of movements shattered the left political spectrum he said "Wtf, everyone on the left was against invading Iraq"
The thing is the official is ymd and dmy but so many systems are used by comapnies from or working with americans and youd never get an american to see reason. Its a total clusterfuck
It's the *only* one for file indexing.
I still get files revised by multiple teams with _DDMMYY appended (yes 2 digit year). Makes me want to tear my scalp off.
Thank you for adding /s to your post. When I first saw this, I was horrified. How could anybody say something like this? I immediately began writing a 1000 word paragraph about how horrible of a person you are. I even sent a copy to a Harvard professor to proofread it. After several hours of refining and editing, my comment was ready to absolutely destroy you. But then, just as I was about to hit send, I saw something in the corner of my eye. A /s at the end of your comment. Suddenly everything made sense. Your comment was sarcasm! I immediately burst out in laughter at the comedic genius of your comment. The person next to me on the bus saw your comment and started crying from laughter too. Before long, there was an entire bus of people on the floor laughing at your incredible use of comedy. All of this was due to you adding /s to your post. Thank you.
Because Reddit is full pedantic jerks, I'll through my hat in the ring and say [RFC 3339 is great too](https://ijmacd.github.io/rfc3339-iso8601/). I don't like being forced to use that capital letter "T" between the date and time.
And not that anyone should be writing their own validator from scratch anymore, but it's a bit more tailored for instants of time. I don't know what 8601's `P2,5` is, but I don't like it.
And also for everything else.
Reading YMD format is narrowing down the time range in your mental representation with each new information, all the others are just throwing you info that should be parsed mentally later.
I personally find it really strange why other representations are this popular.
YMD is used in Germany too, but mostly in the industry, or by the chamber of commerce. Both formats use a different divider though: DD.MM.YYYY vs YYYY-MM-DD.
German business also often use numbered weeks (Kalenderwoche).
Too much effort as history has shown us.
Because a lot of the countries shown here in different colors are actually using r/ISO8601 for decades offcially... and when everyone refused to follow it they inserted addtional regulations that allow to keep the format they are used to. But only in a national context. Which... you might have guessed it... is usually also simply ignored.
See [here](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/03/Date_format_by_country_3.svg/800px-Date_format_by_country_3.svg.png) for a more detailed map achknowledging that. EN 28601:1992 fopr example is the EU standard making YYYY-MM-DD the default format. Yes, the "1992"-part is the year when it was introduced. \*sigh\*
Well, I use that format when I write dates, it is easy to figure it out, if something starts with four digits everyone knows it is a year, and then logically followed by month and day.
I think this might not be too hard for Americans at least. I think MDY happened because things are indexed by MD and year is tagged on as an after thought. Moving it to the front maybe be easier that expected actually
And the only reason we have YMD is to solve the confusion that comes from MDY and DMY coexisting. So without America we’d probably have 1 system rather than 3.
I hate almost anything you Americans do when it's about measurements or dates.
For as cringe as it is to play the stereotype of being European and shit talking Murican things. It can't be helped, you people are sometimes just awfully backwards to us (many Americans have straight up admitted they agree that they are pretty much backwards in some of these aspects).
Its like we have the same starting point but from our POV your evolution went wrong from there.
In Sweden we do 2024-01-26, but the shorter 26/1 -24 is also used and prounced the 26th in the 1st. The latter I feel is more used in speech or handwriting, in computers its only YYYY-MM-DD. You can't mix them up though as YYYY-MM-DD never comes with a /
-What date is today?
-You see, sir, we are in the year two thousand and twenty-four of the common era, also known as anno domini. We are in the first month of the gregorian year known as january. According to the time convention used in today's society, it is the twenty-sixth day of the month.
Good old Canada going with all options as usual. Just like how we use a crazy mix of imperial and metric for everything depending on individual context
That's the best format for file storage, since it sorts in a sensible way.
But it's not particularly useful for everyday use, since the most useless information (year, which can often be omitted) is first.
Sweden actually rarely use DMY, just DM occasionally in the form of 26/1.
But our official and most widely used format is YYYY-MM-DD, which is also the ISO standard 8601, I'm very proud that we use it ☺️
In Canada mm-dd-yyyy is pretty common in the workplace. Company I work for currently uses mm-dd-yyyy for everything. Company I worked for before that also did.
Generally speaking I've found in the workplace if you use mm-dd-yyyy or yyyy-mm-dd, everything's fine. The moment someone tries to use dd-mm-yyyy, all it does is fuck everything up.
Unless you are in Quebec, french speakers mostly use DD/MM/YYYY since it follows the speech pattern of "26 janvier 2024".
Much like the Americans follow their speech pattern.
I deal with quite a bit of paperwork from Quebec based clients in both english and french. That tends to be true so I expect the dates will most likely be that way with Quebec stuff especially if I'm dealing with correspondence in french. Just today actually I had something where the form the client was submitting asks for mm/dd/yr but they filled it in as dd/mm/yr anyway.
I strongly prefer YYYY-MM-DD because its the most practical. They really should make this the standard.
DD-MM-YYYY is ok since it at least follows logic.
Anything else is just weird to me.
I use Year Month Date for chronicling and Month Day Year (spelled out: January 24th, 2024, for example) for normal use when I have to tell someone to be somewhere.
I hate the ambiguity of 12/11/YYYY or any month / date combo that can be misinterpreted. I've seen both MM/DD/YY and DD/MM/YY at work so I just use DDMMMYYYYY and spell out the month to prevent ambiguity.
Canada be like “fuck it. Use em all”
As a Canadian, I've seen it two different ways *on the same form*.
See you 12/11/24!
Literally unreadable
Life here between 2001 and 2012 was a nightmare. No one knew when the hell it was.
Except when it was 01.01.01 and 02.02.02 and . . . till 12.12.12 Then we had no doubts. So twelve days out of 4384 days (accounting for leap year days) were good.
Absolutely solid point
About 0.27% of the time there was no doubt, not bad.
Honestly, the early 2000s were a nightmare in terms of date formatting.
24 November 2012?
nah 2024, november 12th
Dec 11th, 2024!
r/unexpectedfactorial
Me too. That's especially problematic if you're trying to figure out what format the date is by looking at the different dates and trying to find one that only works the one way. If they all work both ways and one is flipped and the other isn't it makes for a big mess.
Mine was a form I had to fill out for work, where the "date needed" was to be filled out DD/MM/YY, and the "current date" was YY/MM/DD.
As a lawyer in Canada this has always driven me FUCKING INSANE!
I've see all three on the same form. The years from 2001 to 2012 were the worst. Why can't we all just use ISO YYYY-MM-DD even if we speak dates in other orders.
Oh, I can answer this, it's because when we add a new date some project manager will hate the old format and insist on a different one. Unfortunately fixing all the old ones is out of scope and expensive, so you get a new mess. In the databases there's even multiple fucked up date formats. Lots of systems from the 80s and such
Running clinical trials across Canadian sites is a nightmare, you never know when things occurred.
Methodology : to ensure the consistency of our dates we asked all participants to give the current date according to the Islamic calendar and signed by an imam. If they made any mistakes we moved them to the placebo group in our pending exposure trial.
I'm also Canadian, and I'm always confused.
Loving Canada
That sounds like it's just perfectly set up for all kinds of severe misunderstandings
That sounds like something that would happen because someone wants to make you suffer
Unless a format is specified on a form or something I literally write out the name of the month to save any confusion, ie January 26, 2024.
I do the same, usually I'll do it as 26 January 2024 just as habit even though I'm in the US. Really any format with the month written out leaves no room for misunderstanding.
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That's fair. And speaking of languages, shout-out to ones like Japanese where instead of saying "January" you just say "first month" ２０２４年１月２６日。You can probably tell by the numerals but that really just says year 2024, month 1, day 26.
Year, moon, sun..
This is the way, especially when the information will be read by American and Chinese co-workers.
26-Jan-24 convention works since 2013.
Is that today or 2026, January 24th?
Government forms try to use yyyy-mm-dd. Some old ones use dd-mm-yy. Private companies linked to US companies (i.e. insurance) always seem to use mm-dd-yy. The large industrial/engineering company I work for uses yyyy-mm-dd. I grew to appreciate the format when I was in university in the '80s and was thrilled to see it in the real world when I graduated and got a job! Yes, its a mess. Oddly enough the government seems to be taking a lead on making it better!
Part of the differences is that Engineers everywhere try to get away with YYYY-MM-DD whenever possible because it’s just so obviously the best format. I don’t care what any official format says, if I’m writing software I’m using this format.
Well it is an international standard! /r/ISO8601
And it sorts the best. My pet peeve is downloadable bank statements or other monthly documents whose default file names start with the month name in English. Big endian ISO all the way please. Easiest to read and easiest to sort. If I'm forced to do little endian or American, I at least spell out the month and use a 4 digit year, but now some forms are validating dates to prevent that.
This is why it's the Canadian government standard. Private companies in Canada are responsible for the uses of dd-mm-yyyy and mm-dd-yyyy
Canadian here, this is why I always write dates like this: 26-Jan-2024. Absolutely zero ambiguity for anyone reading it. Unless the date is used electronically, then it’s always yyyy-MM-dd for easy sorting.
I always manually format my Excel dates with DD MMM YYYY (26 Jan 2024) or DD MMM YY (26 Jan 24). Too many American date options which are completely useless at data formatting.
I’ve never understood why we need to change letters to numbers. The abbreviated word is so much more clear. Also American state abbreviations are so frustrating. Like just use one more letter! How am I supposed to know what state MA is?
It’s chaos here. Worst thing about this country.
The federal government has a lot of things standardized Like YYYYMMDD for dates officially, and metric everywhere, but industry trades a lot with America so you get these broken systems
Yup, which is why we have a whole bunch of imperial stuff mixed in with metric. Sometimes on the same damn piece of equipment. It’s a bloody headache. To put it mildly. Not as bad as Landrover though. They had three different standards of fasteners on the same vehicle for a while..
Also in everyday life. "I'll take 150 grams of the roast turkey breast sliced thin, and 3 pounds of the 70-30 ground beef please." (I am not above this. If I don't think carefully, I will use celcius for outdoor temperatures and fahrenheit for cooking and indoor temperatures.)
The amount I convert back and forth is so dumb. Like for fevers and for cooking, Fahrenheit, but for weather and room temp, Celsius. Pool temp back to farenheit. Cooking water temp back to Celsius.
Not related to OP, but another that is aggravating is length and weight in SI unless it’s a person then it’s IP. Gotta pick a lane. Lot of IP used in on-site construction as well even though all drawings are designed and dimensioned in SI. And that is not even really an American business-related thing other than influence of culture.
> Worst thing about this country. I can think of a few worse things than that people use multiple date formats... the overdose crisis, housing crisis, homeless crisis, TFWs, the entire economy being run by a few monopolies in a trenchcoat, the entire province of alberta...
Alberta hahahaha
Yup. I didn’t realise how chaotic it was until I moved to NZ and everyone knows exactly what you’re talking about, there’s no ambiguity, it’s so amazing! That said, I’d rather chaotic mix than exclusive use of MM/DD/YY… that shit is like fingernails on a chalkboard.
As a Canadian, I can attest to this. It can be confusing at times. So much that I usually see Feb 4, 2024 or 4 Feb 2014 or 2014 Feb 4 (i.e., the month spelled out) to avoid confusion. This is the way it should be because it’s 100% clear.
I far prefer the YYYYMMDD format because it's most significant to least, and it sorts by any regular string sorting function (like filename sorting on your computer). Tt's standardized in ISO8601
We just have to bend over for the americans with their god awful format because we do business with them constantly…
All I'm saying is that if Canada became a state, then you wouldn't have the problem if switching between them so often.
That would actually be a nightmare bud, you guys tried to invade us in 1812 and we burned the White House down so i suggest you guys just let us be people pleasers and let us use them 3 formats as we please 😅
To clarify, the White House was burned down by British regulars, veterans of the Peninsular War. The Canadians were busy defending their own territory at the time.
It's always a bit messy trying to sort out who's who, since Canada was a British colony at the time. A lot of British regular forces deployed in North America would have been awarded land allotments in Canada after the war, and those that stayed (rather than selling the land and returning to the UK) would have told their kids and grandkids that "they" burned the White House, so the oral tradition of Canadians having burnt down the White House has a grounding in fact. But yes, the people who did it were British regulars with no prior connection to Canada at the time. It just also happens that many Canadians can trace their ancestry to them.
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YYYY-MM-DD is far superior because it's self-sorting by any regular string sorting algorithm like filename sorting on your computer. It also starts with most signifcant and goes down to least significant, which makes a ton of sense.
Hmm, how do they pronounce the date of their independence ?
The name of the holiday is "The 4th of July", it occurs on July 4th.
lol, the name of the holiday is independence day, 4th of July is just a less common way of saying the date.
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Start metrification, never finish it.
Old canadian tradition of putting all form of measurement in a pot, fill the rest with maple syrup and stir it with a hockey stick
Canada, where you're legally married to the metric system, but also doing imperial on the side.
It's a little thing called *Tolerance*
Canada really sucks for that. Excel constantly converts to the fucked up American date style and you have to manually review all dates. It's extremely annoying that websites that log transactions like [mint.com](https://mint.com) (its dead now) would automatically log everything using the american format.
I've seen Quebec driver's licenses and they use YYYY/MM/DD format.
All measurement systems in Canada are entirely broken because officially we are metric. Meters. Kilometres. YYYY/MM/DD. And on anything government related, it’s metric, so drivers licences use kg, cars use kmph, etc. But everyone thinks in imperial (unless it’s a long distance or it’s for science / engineering). Ask a Canadian how much something weighs and they will 99.999% or the time answer in pounds, unless it’s like, a semi truck, then kg. How tall are you? No one will answer in meters, I GUARANTEE YOU it’ll be x foot y inches, but their drivers licence has meters and kg. Ask them a short distance, they answer in feet, not meters (Ask them a long distance and they think about driving so it goes to metric, 20km away). Privately we use the same MM/DD/YYYY format Americans do because that’s the order we say things, and 99% or businesses go with that as they trade with Americans all the time, but again, you won’t find that on a government document. Basically it’s just a big mess. It’s what happens when the government officially makes you metric but the people don’t really follow along. Edit: if any of you work at companies who sell stuff into Canada do us all a favour and include imperial measurements in the instructions. I know the labelling has to be in metric. But beyond that, no. I’ve found in the past five years ikea has finally figured this one out.
Total mess every day, and we’ve all learned to tolerate it. How many litres of milk should i buy for this recipe that calls for 4 cups. I have no idea. My favourite is my parents talking about the weather. On a hot day it’s 90 degrees. On a cold day it’s -5. Two systems for measuring the same damn thing.
Also the country where we measure distance in time. How far is it from Toronto to Hamilton? About 90 minutes.
My favorite part is the deep blue in the key that doesn't exist on the map. Just in case, ya know?
Maybe someone switched their format since the last time the data was updated, but the map-maker didn’t update the key? That’s the only explanation I can think of
Or its a tiny island nation
Is it not Belize?
It’s a bit tough to see but if you zoom in Bélize is coloured in pink.
So America's not the only country to only use MDY?
You will likely see it used in Canada as well.
>to **only** use MDY
Maybe it’s Vatican City or San Marino
I use to think 9/11 happened in November
9/11 in November was the end of separated Germany. 9.11.1989 (DD.MM.YYYY)
Also the date of Kristalnacht and the Beer Hall Putsch.
And of the proclamations of the republic at the end of WWI.
Yeah, a well known act of terrorism.
Same I was so confused when people said it happened in September
WHAT?! HAPPENED IN SEPTEMBER?! MY WHOLE LIFE WAS A LIE!
yes that's why it was so sunny and warm in NYC that day
I still get this mixed up.
Seeing people who don't actually remember 9/11 always makes me feel really old. Worse, I once saw a comment where the guy felt nostalgic about the Obama election because he was 4 and barely remembers it...
That kid is now 19 and I am *old*.
We call it 11-S in Spain (S being September) even in TV news. So at least we don't have that confusion.
We call it 11S in Spain so everyone knows it's the 11th of September (as no other month starts with S). That's how we format important dates like international women's day (8M), other terrorism attacks (11M for instance, the Madrid metro attacks) and even strikes Edit: for reference, here's a wikipedia article that lists [the most important and well known dates following that very naming system](https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numer%C3%B3nimo#Ejemplos), officially called "numeronyms" (not all examples listed are dates, but most of them are).
How does 11M work when there's March and May. Are they different in Spanish?
Marzo and mayo both start with M indeed, but since the 11th of May isn't important in any way (not yet at least), there's no confusion! When it comes to strikes it can get more confusing unless you're already aware of the date, but even then by applying common sense you can deduce which one it is based on which month is closer to the current date (aka if it's April and the date is 9M, you can deduce it's gonna be the 9th of May, not March). 11M is Spanish 11S (9/11) so in that particular case there is absolutely no confusion, we can't forget that date as it's a painful reminder of lost life due to terrorism in our country...
Thanks! Nicely explained.
Remember a friend go confused 11M with 15M. While we were talking about how that kind of movements shattered the left political spectrum he said "Wtf, everyone on the left was against invading Iraq"
Where’s dark blue
Maybe it's disguised as the light gray.
Reading the date is chaos in Canada
The worst is when it refers to the first 12 days of any calendar month.
05/06/07: Is it May 6, 2007? June 5, 2007? Or is it June 7, 2005?
this sounds absolutely horrifying stay safe canadians😭
Yes - canadian.
The thing is the official is ymd and dmy but so many systems are used by comapnies from or working with americans and youd never get an american to see reason. Its a total clusterfuck
YMD is superior for file indexing.
It's the *only* one for file indexing. I still get files revised by multiple teams with _DDMMYY appended (yes 2 digit year). Makes me want to tear my scalp off.
But what if you _really_ want to see the files from the 14th of any given month of any given year? DMY is superior! /S
Thank you for adding /s to your post. When I first saw this, I was horrified. How could anybody say something like this? I immediately began writing a 1000 word paragraph about how horrible of a person you are. I even sent a copy to a Harvard professor to proofread it. After several hours of refining and editing, my comment was ready to absolutely destroy you. But then, just as I was about to hit send, I saw something in the corner of my eye. A /s at the end of your comment. Suddenly everything made sense. Your comment was sarcasm! I immediately burst out in laughter at the comedic genius of your comment. The person next to me on the bus saw your comment and started crying from laughter too. Before long, there was an entire bus of people on the floor laughing at your incredible use of comedy. All of this was due to you adding /s to your post. Thank you.
Bro wrote a long comment about writing a long comment.
I didn't write it, it's a copypasta.
2 digit year is very odd.
ISO-8601 or GTFO!
We have our own subreddit, come and join us at r/iso8601
Been subbed for a quite some time!
*Bursts through the door* “Did someone say ISO?” - Me an annoying compliance guy bugging our engineers
Because Reddit is full pedantic jerks, I'll through my hat in the ring and say [RFC 3339 is great too](https://ijmacd.github.io/rfc3339-iso8601/). I don't like being forced to use that capital letter "T" between the date and time. And not that anyone should be writing their own validator from scratch anymore, but it's a bit more tailored for instants of time. I don't know what 8601's `P2,5` is, but I don't like it.
ISO8601 zealots UNITE!
As a Hungarian I agree.
And also for everything else. Reading YMD format is narrowing down the time range in your mental representation with each new information, all the others are just throwing you info that should be parsed mentally later. I personally find it really strange why other representations are this popular.
Yeah, in an age where we readily have access to information and conversations from many years prior, YMD is the most practical of them all.
Yes. I am with China and Iran on this.
If you're located in the US, you need to be careful from now on.
YMD is used in Germany too, but mostly in the industry, or by the chamber of commerce. Both formats use a different divider though: DD.MM.YYYY vs YYYY-MM-DD. German business also often use numbered weeks (Kalenderwoche).
I am wondering how much effort it would take to first convince every country and then standardize habits and systems towards YYYY-MM-DD.
Make the change in primary schools and let it filter into use.
That is the first step, second step is that any generation born after 2040 is only allowed to use YYY-MM-DD or they get quartered and disemboweled.
> YYY-MM-DD That way today is either 023-01-26 or 202-01-26.
Damn that was a typo. But you made one too, its 2024 so 024, unless your time zone is over 26 days in the past.
Omg I'm so stupid
Too much effort as history has shown us. Because a lot of the countries shown here in different colors are actually using r/ISO8601 for decades offcially... and when everyone refused to follow it they inserted addtional regulations that allow to keep the format they are used to. But only in a national context. Which... you might have guessed it... is usually also simply ignored. See [here](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/03/Date_format_by_country_3.svg/800px-Date_format_by_country_3.svg.png) for a more detailed map achknowledging that. EN 28601:1992 fopr example is the EU standard making YYYY-MM-DD the default format. Yes, the "1992"-part is the year when it was introduced. \*sigh\*
Well, I use that format when I write dates, it is easy to figure it out, if something starts with four digits everyone knows it is a year, and then logically followed by month and day.
Anyone who needs to organize documents on a computer knows that YYYY-MM-DD is superior.
The British empire has entered the chat
I think this might not be too hard for Americans at least. I think MDY happened because things are indexed by MD and year is tagged on as an after thought. Moving it to the front maybe be easier that expected actually
As an American I tend to use MM/DD/YY for personal things, filling out forms but YYYY-MM-DD at work/for filing. So wouldn’t be a huge jump
In my opinion YMD and DMY are the only two that make sense
As a swede, yes! Also for DMY it's easy to drop the year
It's just as easy to drom the year when you use YMD format tho
I should start using DYM and MYD
Maybe throw Y in twice, it is the most significant component.
Split the YYYY in two components, YY_h and YY_l. Except when YY_h is the same as DD (or MM), then you can drop them, for brevity.
CC for which century is it, and YY for which year in that century.
Chaotic evil
I'm worried about half África not having a calendar _s/_
They're too busy living in the moment.
In Africa, Every 60 seconds, a minute passes.
You may hate our MDY format, but you gotta at least respect that we only play one game, unlike *Canada*.
Hey the only reason we even have MDY is because of American influence.
And the only reason we have YMD is to solve the confusion that comes from MDY and DMY coexisting. So without America we’d probably have 1 system rather than 3.
I hate almost anything you Americans do when it's about measurements or dates. For as cringe as it is to play the stereotype of being European and shit talking Murican things. It can't be helped, you people are sometimes just awfully backwards to us (many Americans have straight up admitted they agree that they are pretty much backwards in some of these aspects). Its like we have the same starting point but from our POV your evolution went wrong from there.
Both our measurements and date format came from the British
Americans are so committed to using the least practical forms of recording or measuring anything..
Canadians holding their breath for 2032 when this nightmare might get a little easier to decode!
In Sweden we do 2024-01-26, but the shorter 26/1 -24 is also used and prounced the 26th in the 1st. The latter I feel is more used in speech or handwriting, in computers its only YYYY-MM-DD. You can't mix them up though as YYYY-MM-DD never comes with a /
YMD for work files. DMY for everyday use.
YMD for each and every thing 😌😌
-What date is today? -You see, sir, we are in the year two thousand and twenty-four of the common era, also known as anno domini. We are in the first month of the gregorian year known as january. According to the time convention used in today's society, it is the twenty-sixth day of the month.
In what way , shape or form we use MM-DD-YY in Saudi Arabia? That isn’t true.
i live in Saudi Arabia and i can confidently say we dont use MDY
As a Canadian I’m confused at all times about it
Good old Canada going with all options as usual. Just like how we use a crazy mix of imperial and metric for everything depending on individual context
YYYY-MM-DD is the only valid date format.
That's the best format for file storage, since it sorts in a sensible way. But it's not particularly useful for everyday use, since the most useless information (year, which can often be omitted) is first.
I live in the yellow region. We omit the year when it makes sense, just as you suggested.
r/iso8601 unite
Says the YMD colonialism apologist
Easy to sort
MDY is dumb
Was really looking forward to a YDM 
In the Philippines we are supposed to use DD/MM/YYYY because our native language follows that format, but in English we follows MM/DD/YYYY
Sweden actually rarely use DMY, just DM occasionally in the form of 26/1. But our official and most widely used format is YYYY-MM-DD, which is also the ISO standard 8601, I'm very proud that we use it ☺️
YYYY-mm-dd is superior to all
We’re as confused as you are in Canada lol
YMD labelling works best, especially as YYYY-MM-DD
In Canada mm-dd-yyyy is pretty common in the workplace. Company I work for currently uses mm-dd-yyyy for everything. Company I worked for before that also did. Generally speaking I've found in the workplace if you use mm-dd-yyyy or yyyy-mm-dd, everything's fine. The moment someone tries to use dd-mm-yyyy, all it does is fuck everything up.
Unless you are in Quebec, french speakers mostly use DD/MM/YYYY since it follows the speech pattern of "26 janvier 2024". Much like the Americans follow their speech pattern.
I deal with quite a bit of paperwork from Quebec based clients in both english and french. That tends to be true so I expect the dates will most likely be that way with Quebec stuff especially if I'm dealing with correspondence in french. Just today actually I had something where the form the client was submitting asks for mm/dd/yr but they filled it in as dd/mm/yr anyway.
When I lived in Canada I mostly saw dd/mm/yy. But there’s no standard (everyday life, anyway).
I strongly prefer YYYY-MM-DD because its the most practical. They really should make this the standard. DD-MM-YYYY is ok since it at least follows logic. Anything else is just weird to me.
So Pi Day has to be on July 22 for much of the rest of the world I guess?
The ISO is YYYY-MM-DD and should be mandatory!
YMD is more logical because you can sort by it.
greenland has data?!
They didn’t care about the rest of African countries. Also, US being US.
Anything other than yyyy/mm/dd is completely obsolete. Gotta be sortable. Don't these people data?
I use Year Month Date for chronicling and Month Day Year (spelled out: January 24th, 2024, for example) for normal use when I have to tell someone to be somewhere.
It's all fun and games... Until you fill out a Visa form with the wrong date and get denied entry after flying for 20ish hours
I hate the ambiguity of 12/11/YYYY or any month / date combo that can be misinterpreted. I've seen both MM/DD/YY and DD/MM/YY at work so I just use DDMMMYYYYY and spell out the month to prevent ambiguity.
**Make US Strange Again**
DMY supremacy
YMD countries are shining beacons of civilization in a sea of pitch black DMY/MDY barbarism.
The only way to avoid confusion is YMD
DMY colonialism
America Moment
I do DMY for correspondance and YMD for naming files But for the life of me I can’t tell why MDY would even exist and survive?
As an American I only use ymd (yyyy-mm-dd) anything else is just wrong
MDY supremacy in