They will also often forego using the year at all because it might sound strange to say:Īfter all, the likelihood is that you already know what year it is. This concept of months coming before days is more informal, and many American users prefer it in conversational English. Since the month comes before the date here, it makes more sense for them to follow the MM/DD/YYYY. If you asked an American English speaker for the date, they are more likely to say: Usually, you can refer to spoken English rules when you want to know which date format is more common.
It’s also more common for US speakers to phrase a date in this manner when asked for one. This comes from the original way of writing dates, according to Anglo-Saxon (old English) rules. In American English, the correct date format is MM/DD/YYYY. However, if an American English user were to look at that date, they would assume that you mean the 12th of May, 1996. Here, the 5th of December, 1996 is being referred to. In British English, you might see the following used: Therefore, it makes sense to write them in ascending order from smallest to largest. Days are smaller than months, which are smaller than years. Most of them prefer to say “June 1st” when they want to refer to what time of the year it is.īritish English (and European countries) prefer the increasing size of the date format. To American English users, this idea of DD/MM/YYYY in spoken English sounds a bit too formal. The date (1st) comes before the month (June), so it makes sense for that to be adapted into the DD/MM/YYYY format. If you were to ask a British English speaker what the date was today, they would more than likely say something like this: They also took this form from Europe rather than keeping the original MM/DD/YYYY format. It is appropriate for British English users to use this form because of the more formal spoken rules associated with naming dates. The correct date format in the UK is DD/MM/YYYY. Watch the video: Only 1 percent of our visitors get these 3 grammar questions right. However, if that was written with the American English format in mind, it would actually be the 10th of January.Īs you can probably already tell, it gets very confusing very quickly for most native speakers. Here, a British English speaker would assume you are referring to the 1st of October, 2012. However, most British English users will get very confused when looking at a MM/DD/YYYY date. For that reason, it should be much more popular in British English than it is today. Oddly enough, the format MM/DD/YYYY was the original Anglo-Saxon way of writing a date. The European format is the most common format in the world, and the American one is only used within the USA.
In American English, you will find MM/DD/YYYY, whereas, in Europe and British English, you will find DD/MM/YYYY. There are two correct ways to write dates. This article will look into the different formats available for dates. Funnily enough, there are a few different formats out there that exist based on where you are in the world. Dates might seem like simple things only written in one format, but this is not the case.
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