[prima-facie]

If you are from Europe, even if you're not living in the UK, the en-GB locale will feel a lot more familiar to you than the en-US one.

It uses the dd-mm-yyyy date format like the rest of Europe, the start of the week is on Monday (vs Sunday in the US), the default paper size is A4 (vs US letter), measurement defaults are metric (indeed UK roads use imperial, but the default is otherwise metric), the time format uses 24hrs (vs AM/PM in the US).

[TimK65]

So thankful that we use the correct date format (yyyy-mm-dd) in Sweden.

[My_Name]

Can I just say that, as someone born and bred in the UK, YYYY-MM-DD is the only correct way to display a date wherever you live.

Anything else is as bad as using mm:hh...

[reaperducer]

as someone born and bred in the UK, YYYY-MM-DD is the only correct way to display a date

Do you also address your mail to "United Kingdom, Scotland, Edinburgh;" or tell people, "I'm going on holiday to Croatia, Split?"

[LoveMortuus]

I do write Lisbon, Portugal, whenever I talk about where I live. Doesn't take much extra effort to provide more precision and avoids possible confusions.

[verzali]

You probably should, actually.

[pchangr]

TIL mm:hh is a thing o_O

[Pooge]

> Anything else is as bad as using mm:hh...

Please tell me that's not a thing.

[tempodox]

Just look at your crontab, love.

[dhosek]

It is now.

[ben_w]

In a moment of whimsy I briefly considered a date format where digits were sorted alphabetically.

2026-07-02-16-31-52 -> -----00011222235667

Hopefully it will remain a nonsense and never be seen in the wild, unlike the phone number field which I found on a real website which responded to scroll events to increase and decrease the value it contained.

[card_zero]

Well that's just totally ambiguous. What you should do instead is treat the date as one long number and present its factors, for instance 2⁴⋅11⋅7649⋅15050023, much more practical.

[tremon]

That's not alphabetically, that's asciibetically. The alphabetical (English) sort would be something like ::--51176632222000

[rich_sasha]

How about just sort the numbers from biggest to smallest?

2026-07-02 16:45 becomes

2026-45-16-06-02

Bonus points for using a very confusing separator... Maybe {?

[debesyla]

Wait, can this format be transformed back to the "normal" format? If so, then it could be kinda viable for some operations... :thinking_emoji:

[SpaceNoodled]

Well it's a NUMBER

[bmacho]

Wrong decimal tho.

Why isn't there an en-EU or en-ISO locale that has:

  - yyyy-mm-dd
  - SI units
  - 1,234.56 number format

[aendruk]

It is possible to define a custom locale with these features, e.g. https://andrew.kvalhe.im/2022-09-09

  $ echo "$LANG"; date
  en_US.UTF-8@aspirational
  2026-07-02T11:17:00-07:00

[brnt]

The European Commission published its own language guide. In terms of English it's only a small deviation from en-GB, but my first thought was indeed: when can I set en-EU?

[reirob]

Do you have a link to this publication?

[bmacho]

https://knowledge-centre-translation-interpretation.ec.europ...

> This style guide is intended primarily for English-language authors and translators, both in-house and freelance, working for the European Commission.

It specifies formats for date, numbers etc.

[sph]

I can tolerate the comma as thousands separator, but I hate the dot as thousands separator. Use a space or ' if you want to be fancy.

I wish we’d rip the bandaid off and invent a new character that makes it unambiguous across the world.

[btschaegg]

Because that comma is a crime against legibility.

[pezezin]

Nowadays the recomended thousands separator by most international standards is a blank space.

And having been raised in the continent, I personally find using commas for thousands disgusting.

[marcellus23]

as an American this is my favorite format. Sortable, and the mm-dd order reflects the standard American way of writing month+day, and yyyy is unambiguously the year since it's 4 letters. Best of both worlds.

[SpaceNoodled]

This format is an American?

[WithinReason]

That's also the ISO standard since it sorts correctly

[rkangel]

I believe it's the ISO standard because it is obviously distinguishable from both the MM-DD-YY (US) date order and the DD-MM-YY (UK/EU/Others) date order and so is unambiguous.

https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html

The fact that they are then sortable is a nice side benefit!

[anotherevan]

Although my (AU) locale is dd-mm-yyyy, I'll use yyyy-mm-dd anywhere I have to write a date in all numbers to avoid any ambiguity. It also has the advantage of sorting correctly in things like file names.

For something more likely to be read by a human and not parsed by a computer (and is not locale or i18n/l10n flexible) I'll use d mmm yyyy, e.g., 3 Jul 2026. To my thinking, for English speaking this is the friendliest unambiguous format (although I'm sure opinions will differ).

[TimK65]

"Friday 3 July 2026" (yes, I elected to spell out the month) also has the advantage of not requiring commas for legibility ("Friday, July 3, 2026" being common in the US).

[anotherevan]

Yeah, I'll add the abbreviated day ("Thu 3 Jul 2026") where it makes sense to.

[fmajid]

I've taken to using the Swedish locale for that very reason (French-American living in the UK).

[3836293648]

Vad himla pratar du om? ALLT använder dd/mm-yy. Jag har aldrig sett något på svenska som använder yyyy-mm-dd, det finns bara inte. Det finns i Sverige, men då är det också på engelska.

[TimK65]

"Vad himla pratar du om?"? I in my turn have never heard that expression before, so who's zoomin' who, baby?

[hk1337]

The superior date format. Superior to all others.

[delta_p_delta_x]

Not to mention the fact that English basically everywhere else but the US is essentially en-GB with a few choice changes and anachronisms. Consider en-IN, en-IE, en-SG, en-MY, en-AU, en-NZ, etc.

[chrismorgan]

I started writing something a while ago with preliminary title “Do en and en-US, not en and en-GB”.

If you cluster English dialects by various characteristics, you’ll end up with en-US as a clear outlier. I believe that, if you’re going to divide English into two camps, the best is “English (International)” and “English (US)”. Canadian English is the one that’s closest to US English, but even it works at least as well based on International English as regards spelling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_s... is an interesting read).

But there’s a lot more to it than spelling, and here the distinction is even clearer: the US has its own length, area, volume, weight and temperature units that no one else uses; its own stupid date format that everyone else loathes; its own paper sizes that no one else knows what to do with.

Not everyone else agrees on which date format to use, but we do all agree that any of our formats (DD/MM/YY, DD-MM-YYYY, YYYY-MM-DD, &c.) are better than the US’s middle-endian monstrosity. Though if we see the likes of DD/MM/YYYY we may mistrust whether it’s actually MM/DD/YYYY.

I also believe that you should default to English (International) for all users geolocated outside the USA.

Once you’ve get this divide right, adding further dialects also probably becomes quite a bit easier. But I do wish for diamond inheritance of locales: so you can mix in -ise/-ize, -yse/-yze, -re/-er, -ence/-ense, program/programme, and thereby deduplicate a fair bit across locales.

(There are still plenty of differences: such as time formats; decimal/grouping separators though I believe all places where English is a main language use . for decimal and , for grouping; even number grouping varies: en-IN does 1,23,45,678 rather than 12,345,678; keyboard layout; word choices; and lots more.)

(One last point: the naming is a bit fiddly. “Spanish (International)” means Spanish as used outside Spain. “English (International)” means the broad international/non-US consensus of what English is, generally following what England does but probably with kilometres instead of miles for long distances.)

[ErroneousBosh]

> preliminary title “Do en and en-US,

You mean "English" and "English (Simplified)"?

[chrismorgan]

Some of the spellings are simplified, but the rest of it (units and such) is complicationified.

[pezezin]

More like it has not been simplified yet.

[kimos]

Unfortunately en-CA is not really supported as a locale and we have to choose between en-US and en-GB. I’ll usually choose the latter, because despite more differences in language, there is more alignment between Canada and British English in spelling, units, and style.

I really wish en-CA was as well supported as fr-CA honestly.

[1over137]

Who would one lobby to have better en-CA support? OS vendors? browser vendors? ISO? Is there some governing body of such things?

[zeristor]

I can’t find en-En…

[jdw64]

So in East Asia they basically teach British English. Seeing that made it clear to me.

[elAhmo]

Same as in Balkans. We literally used coursebooks from Britain.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Yes but in Greece what we really learned English from was American movies and comics.

[lionkor]

In Europe (at least DE and NL), we also usually are taught British English in schools.

[dofm]

Except that if you were brought up in the 50s/60s/70s/80s in the Netherlands, you may have learned to speak English with what sounds to a Brit like an American accent, in part because so many of your EFL teachers were former US soldiers or their spouses who settled. (Exposure to US media is a secondary aspect)

This was a very noticeable phase in the UK; I knew several Dutch people who were fully unaware they had American accents and some American linguistic traits until they got here.

Whereas Dutch friends of my father who learned English before WWII had actually quite plummy English accents.

[TFNA]

In a number of European countries now, US English is now taught, and this superseded UK English already a generation ago.

[pezezin]

I prefer en-IE, which is the same plus Euro as the default currency.

[messe]

And kilometers instead of miles.

[MrJohz]

The time format in the UK is mostly 12hr, although people are generally aware of 24hr time. In my experience, while there are usually more similarities between the UK and the rest of Europe, Europeans also have more exposure to American English than to British English, so it ends up being a bit of a wash, particularly when it comes to pronunciation, spelling, or idioms.

[Symbiote]

In the UK anything "serious" like a train/plane ticket/timetable uses the 24 hour clock. That includes the default way to show a digital clock on a watch, phone or computer.

[MrJohz]

Timetables yes, but whenever I've bought a digital watch or set up a new device, the default has always been 12-hour. If you ask people the time in the afternoon, they will almost always give you the 12-hour format. People can understand both, but typically default to 12-hour times.

This is in stark constrast to Germany, say, where people colloquially use 24-hour times, with some exceptions for round times (e.g. 17:00 might be called "um fünf", but 17:05 would usually be described as "siebzehn uhr fünf", roughly translated as "seventeen oh five".

This might have changed in the last five years or so since I was living in the UK, but I've never noticed this be different when I was visiting, nor when speaking to British friends or colleagues.

[carlosjobim]

Not "serious" per se, but anything which can be subject to misunderstanding.

[hdgvhicv]

It’s been years since I saw any am/pm time in written form, while people will say 7:30, they will write 19:30

[roryirvine]

In my experience, people do sometimes still use am/pm for whole hour times ("4pm"), especially in informal writing.

But it would be beyond bizarre to write "3:59 pm"

[abanana]

"Beyond bizarre"? Why? "3:59pm" (and 7:30pm, regarding the post above) is exactly what's usually written in the UK. Technical use (24-hour) is different from the standard use used by the general population.

[dhosek]

In earlier versions of OS X, setting your date format to have the day before the month was sufficient to also alter the default paper size to A4, which was really inconvenient for me since I prefer the day-month ordering (and as a consequence of buying a digital watch in the Netherlands which only had instructions in Dutch which I didn’t understand, I developed the habit of using 24 hour time), but I live in the US and only rarely encounter paper which isn’t 8.5x11.

[sneak]

Don't you mean paper which isn't 215.9 by 279.4 mm?

Go on, switch your thermostat in the US to degrees C. Join us.

[dhosek]

I’m likely moving to Mexico next year, so I’ve switched the temperature reading on my watch to Celsius in preparation. The problem is that bands of ten degrees in Fahrenheit translate nicely to comfort levels,¹ which is not really true for Celsius, or at least I’m still adapting to get a sense of what those numbers mean in practice.

⸻

1. For the record:

below 0: Stay inside, drink warm cocoa

0–10: Only go out if you have to

10–20: Cold, but doable

20–30: Nice winter-sports temperature

30–40: Cold, but you could run out to the garage without a coat if you had to

40–50: Cold, but you don’t need a scarf or gloves

50–60: Cool. wear a jacket

60–70: Cool, wear a light jacket

70–80: Perfect

80–90: Warm, but not too bad. Go to the pool.

90–100: Ugh, hot. Tell your parents that you’ll pay their electric bill if necessary but they need to turn on the air conditioning.

100+: Stay inside, eat ice cream.

[sneak]

It's pretty much universally agreed that: a) Fahrenheit is more ergonomic for human perception of temperatures, and b) the 7+ billion who use degrees C every single day don't find this to be a problem.

[SpaceNoodled]

This scale makes no sense in Fahrenheit or Celsius

[anotherevan]

Australian's use mostly the same, except for the time format where AM/PM is still predominant. Also Celsius for temperature and 1,000.0 for number formatting.

[penguin_booze]

> It uses the dd-mm-yyyy date format like the rest of Europe

Everywhere sane uses a monotonic order: either increasing or decreasing units. Americans had to be different, somehow - it's a compulsion.

[reaperducer]

Americans had to be different, somehow - it's a compulsion.

Americans inherited it from the British through colonialism.

Later, the British adopted the French method, as through history they periodically go through periods of Francophilia.

Look in a good British antiques store or archive and you will see letters penned by Queen Victoria using the "American" date method.

[qweqwe14]

Just use the C.UTF-8 locale:

SI units everywhere

ISO date and time

American English

24 hour clock

etc

I think Windows has "English International" locale or something

[prima-facie]

>> ISO date and time

Yes, but not always in my experience:

    # Default locale is en_GB.utf8
    
    > date  
    Fri  3 Jul 12:14:20 BST 2026
    
    > date +%x  
    03/07/26
    
    > LC_TIME="C.UTF-8" date   
    Fri Jul  3 12:14:29 BST 2026
    
    > LC_TIME="C.UTF-8" date +%x  
    07/03/26