[alkonaut]

So the format comes from how it is read? That sounds plausible. "October 19th, 2014". I'd pronounce a date like "day, month, year" but always format it yyyy-mm-dd, it never struck me that a date format (abbreviation) should be possible to pronounce without first parsing it completely. It does make sense, I just never thought about it.

A reasonable (i.e. sortable) date format is 2014/10/19 but that would make sense in spoken form only as "2014, October 19th" which doesn't sound quite right.

A sidenote: in northern europe (Germany, Sweden etc.) we do it wrong on addresses: [Street, Number, PostalCode, City/Region, Country]. Going from smallest to largest context is actually done correctly in english [Number, Street, PostalCode, City/Region, Country]. You can sort addresses lexically!