Complain on American Date Format

In the United States, the date format is uniquely distinctive and stands out globally. Unlike the European "small to large" DMY format or the East Asian "large to small" YMD format, the U.S. uses MDY. Moreover, unlike other Europeans who prefer pure numeric date formats, Americans use a semi-numeric, semi-English format: English month + numeric date + numeric year. For example, today is November 27, 2024. While a British person might write it as 27/11/2024, an American would write it as November 27, 2024!

Below is a map of date formats around the world:

In the map, blue areas represent DMY, yellow areas represent YMD, red areas use a mix of DMY and MDY, green areas use a mix of DMY and YMD, and pink areas exclusively use MDY. The only country that uses this date format is the United States.

A British author once complained American written form, and wrote this on his book.

“Most British people write the day first, followed by the month. Businesspeople and older women still insist on putting the month first.”
—— Have His Carcase, by Dorothy Leigh Sayers

I am genuinely puzzled by the logic behind the American date format. Many former British colonies or Commonwealth countries have adopted the British DMY format. But why didn't the United States, once a British colony heavily influenced by British culture, inherit the DMY format?

In fact, the American insistence on their date format has led to some amusing anecdotes. For instance, a British woman and an American man planned a date and wrote "10/12/1997" in their letters. However, they never met. Why? Because the American man understood it as October 12, while the British woman understood it as December 10!

If the world only had YMD and DMY formats, even when Asians and Westerners read each other's texts, there would be no ambiguity.

For example, dates like "2024-11-11" and "11-11-2024" can be easily understood by looking at the position of the year, allowing one to quickly determine the date format and identify the corresponding month and day. The world would be a much better place.

However, the problem lies in the strong influence of the United States in computer science and technology, which has forced their culture, including the anti-human MDY date format, onto the world, including Europe.

If you encounter an English text with a date like "11/11/2024" and cannot determine whether it was written by an American or a British person, how would you interpret it?

As a result, many English-speaking countries, including several European nations, have had to compromise: when dates are ambiguous, the month should be written in abbreviated form. For example, the British would write the above date as 11 November, 2024, or 11 Nov. 2024.

Thus, the world is now caught in a three-way battle between MDY, YMD, and DMY.

The origins of the YMD and DMY formats reflect the long-term practical needs of Eastern and Western civilizations. The reasons for these differences are varied and inconclusive, but there are two plausible explanations from cultural needs and cognitive linguistics.

The first explanation is based on cultural needs.

For a long time, the Chinese did not adopt the Western Gregorian calendar but used the era name system. Era names held significant political importance in ancient China, reflecting the will of the state and the emperor. After Emperor Wu of Han, official documents often placed the era name at the beginning to show its importance. China, being an agricultural society, developed the lunar calendar, where agricultural activities were often organized by months for planting, cultivating, and harvesting. Hence, the Chinese prioritized the year and month. Other East Asian countries like Korea, Japan, and Mongolia were also influenced by the Chinese lunar calendar.

Europeans, on the other hand, had a different approach. During the Middle Ages, Europe was deeply religious, and Europeans frequently participated in religious activities such as Sundays and sermon days. Church activities emphasized specific dates of holidays and religious events, with months being secondary information and years changing less frequently, thus placed last. For example: "Die 31 mensis Decembris anno Domini 2024" (December 31, 2024). This tradition of prioritizing the "day" has continued in many European countries, influencing their date formats.

The second explanation comes from cognitive linguistics.

From a linguistic perspective, the Western DMY format is used because European languages generally follow a logical sequence from specific to abstract, with the date as a modifier expressed first, close to the core words of month and year. In many Indo-European languages, modifiers (such as specific dates or temporal features) usually precede the main information. Western address formats also share this characteristic, starting with the house number and street, followed by the city, state, or province. This format aligns with the European linguistic habit of "modifiers being close to the modified object" and fits their cultural emphasis on logic and linear time flow. Chinese, using a large-to-small logic (year → month → day), emphasizes the progressive relationship of time, aligning with the Chinese narrative structure of "background to specifics."

In my opinion, the best date format should be one that is friendly to both humans and computers, which is the YMD format popular in East Asian countries. YMD is more intuitive for humans and most convenient for organizing documents.

While the differences between YMD and DMY can be explained from various angles, what is the logic behind the American MDY format? What is the rationale for using MDY?

After extensive online research, I have not found a concrete reason.

I strongly suspect that some American just came up with this date format on a whim.

Since most languages (like Chinese and English) are read from left to right, imagine you need to sort a pile of documents by date. When you see a date like "20241111," you can easily scan the numbers 2-0-2-4-1-1-1-1 in sequence, quickly identifying the year and month prefix, and categorize it into a "broad range" for easier sorting. However, if the date format is the British DMY, like "12072024," you need to interrupt your reading flow, start scanning from the end (4-2-0-2), then correct the order to "2-0-2-4" to identify the year, and then scan "7-0," correcting it to "0-7" to identify July. Thus, when scanning a DMY date, extracting the year and month requires changing direction four times. While manageable in the short term, it becomes a significant mental burden with large workloads, greatly increasing the chance of errors due to carelessness.

The YMD format is also very computer-friendly. YMD dates can be directly sorted in computers, as the string format "2024-07-12" is sequentially encoded, making dictionary sorting straightforward.

Imagine you have two files:

2024-11-12-document1.docx
2024-12-07-document2.docx

With the date format prefix, the former file name will always have a higher dictionary order than the latter, allowing file explorers to sort by date directly using the file names.

Numeric dates like "20240712" also make it easy to compare two dates using simple computer comparison operators like > and <, without needing additional processing.

These advantages are not present in the DMY format.

American stubbornness is not limited to date formats; their measurement standards are also a mess. For example, Fahrenheit and imperial units (miles, inches, feet, gallons, ounces, etc.). The imperial system originated during the Roman Empire in Europe and has long been a confusing mess with no fixed standards, changing over different historical periods. It wasn't until the Middle Ages that Britain standardized these units.

However, when Britain established the imperial system, there were no strict, standard measurements. For example, an inch was defined as the length of three barleycorns laid end to end, and a foot was the distance from King Edward's nose to his outstretched hand. The problem is, using barleycorns to define an inch means a thousand barleycorns could have a thousand different lengths, and using body parts for length definitions means a thousand people could have a thousand different lengths. It remains a confusing mess.

The long-standing confusion in measurements was only resolved with the development of modern French natural science, leading to the strict definition of the metric system. The metric system uses reproducible physical experiments for definitions, making it much more rigorous than the imperial system.

Thus, today, the entire world, except the United States, uses the metric system. But the U.S. remains an outlier, stubbornly clinging to the imperial tradition under the guise of "cultural heritage" and "preserving freedom and diversity." The American refusal to adopt the metric system is as irrational as the Lilliputians in Gulliver's Travels arguing over which end of an egg to crack. It's truly bizarre.