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by sephlietz 1068 days ago
The argument is that writing the parts in a consistently increasing or decreasing precision order makes more sense.

So these are good.

- year / month / day

- day / month / year

And this is bad.

- month / day / year

3 comments

While I am a strong supporter of ISO8601 (e.g. 2023-07-12) there is an argument that decreasing specificity is preferable (as in ISO8601) and that for most day-to-day usage the year is somewhat implicit, hence being at the end.

Personally, I write the month out if I'm not using 8601 formatting to avoid any ambiguity.

For any sort of recordkeeping, though, I think it's preferable to go full on YYYY-MM-DD. It's more thorough, precise, and sorts properly on a computer.

Outside the US, how is a month+day combination written out/spoken?

"May 3" / "May 3rd" or "3 May" ?

In most contexts I would never use the cardinal number "3", it'd always be "the 3rd of May" or "May (the) 3rd", but in a country like Australia (with a high number of speakers from different cultural backgrounds) you hear all sorts of conventions used in casual conversation.
3 May in Italy. It’s always day first. You never hear anyone saying or writing the month first.
“3rd of may”
I don't think "it makes more sense" is exactly describing the reasoning.
Neither do I, but the rest of what I wrote does.