How do you write the date? I worked with a CEO who demanded the company respect its international operations by writing the date this way: DAY-MONTH-YEAR, or 17/5/2019. That’s backwards from how I was taught to write it in grammar school when it was MONTH-DAY-YEAR. or 5/17/2019. What’s an Ugly American to do in a globalized world?
I still hew to the common American format in my writing and speaking when I need to insert a date into a sentence: “Today is May 17, 2019.” But Non-American English speakers prefer to say the day first, as in “The Japanese attacked on the 7th of December,1941.” This follows the “biblical” construction used in many formal religious and legal documents: “On the 7th day of December, in the year of our Lord 1941.”
But neither written or spoken expression works when managing a lot of files that are being reviewed and red-lined by clients and their lawyers. I need a format that will allow me to sort a directory and the contents of each subdirectory in chronological order. In that case I follow the ISO 8601 format which seems to me to make the most sense: YEAR-MONTH-DAY. For example. a document is named with the date first, in descending order of the time units’ “size” and then separated by hyphens with an underscore after the date and before the document’s name, followed by another hyphen, my initials, another hyphen and the version number: 2019-05-17_documentname_DCC_V1.ext
The ISO format can be sorted but every single-digit month and day –like “May 5” –must be preceded by a zero, (e.g. 2019-o5-17) or it won’t sort correctly.
The various options are bewildering without the International Standard Organization’s official guidance.
- DMY: Day-Month-Year: this, according to Wikipedia, is “common to the majority of the world’s countries and is the preferred form used by the United Nations. This is what that old CEO wanted. But even then there are a lot of options when writing in that format. “17 May 2019” is expressed with a period after the date in German-speaking countries: “17.May 2019.” Then there is: 17/05/2019; 17-05-2019;17-May-2019; 17May19; “The 17th of May 2019”; 17/May/2019; Friday 17 May 2019; 17/v/19 (when the Roman numeral is used to signify the month by some schools and by the Vatican (to avoid using the names of months named after Roman pagan gods) and in Canada to make the format bilingual for English and French speakers.
- YMD: Year-Month-Day: this is favored in East Asia and a few other countries and is expressed as: 2019-05-17 or 2019/05/17. ISO 8601 follows this format, but expresses it as a monolithic eight digit number for digital file names: 20190517.
- MDY: Month-Day-Year: This is the U.S. format (also used in the Philippines and English-speaking Canada): May 17, 2019 or 05-17-2019 or 5/17/19/
- YDM: Year-Day-Month: 2019.17.05 or 2019 17 May. This is how they write the date in Kazakhstan,Latvia, Nepal and Turkmenistan. In case you wondered……
Internet dates are defined by RFC 3339 and is expressed as YYYY-MM-DD.
So why get all global and follow the ISO standard? Wikipedia explains:
“One of the advantages of using the ISO 8601 date format is that the lexicographical order (ASCIIbetical) of the representations is equivalent to the chronological order of the dates, assuming that all dates are in the same time zone. Thus dates can be sorted using simple string comparison algorithms, and indeed by any left to right collation….The YYYY-MM-DD layout is the only common format that can provide this.”
Wikipedia: “Calendar Date”
