Us dating format

Date and time notation in the United States differs us dating format that used in nearly all other countries. It is inherited from one historical branch of conventions from the United Kingdom. In the United States, dates are traditionally written in the “month-day-year” order, with neither increasing nor decreasing order of significance.

The day-month-year order has been increasing in usage since the early 1980s. Many genealogical databases and the Modern Language Association citation style use this format. American English is becoming more common outside of the media industry and legal documents, particularly in university publications and in some internationally influenced publications as a means of dealing with ambiguity. The year-month-day order, such as the ISO 8601 “YYYY-MM-DD” notation is popular in computer applications because it reduces the amount of code needed to resolve and compute dates. It is also commonly used in software cases where there are many separately dated items, such as documents or media, because sorting alphabetically will automatically result in the content being listed chronologically.

The United States military normally uses the “dd mmm yyyy” format for correspondence. The common month-day-year format is used when corresponding with civilians. While most countries use the 24-hour clock, the United States differs in that it uses the 12-hour clock almost exclusively, not only in spoken language, but also in writing, even on timetables, for airline tickets, and computer software. The 24-hour clock is used in military and scientific contexts in the United States. It is best known for its use by the military, and therefore commonly called “military time”. The 24-hour notation is also widely used by astronomers, hospitals, various forms of transportation, and at radio and other broadcast media outlets behind the scenes where scheduling programming needs to be exact, without mistaking AM and PM.

In these cases, exact and unambiguous communication of time is critical. 24-hour character of the given time. 10:00 ten o’clock, 2:00 two o’clock, 4:00 four o’clock, etc. This may be followed by the a. O’clock itself may be omitted, leaving a time such as four a. Minutes :01 through :09 are usually pronounced as oh one through oh nine. 10 through :59 are their usual number-words.

Times of day from :01 to :29 minutes past the hour are commonly pronounced with the words “after” or “past”, for example, 10:17 being “seventeen after ten” or “seventeen past ten”. 15 minutes is very commonly called “quarter after” or “quarter past” and :30 minutes universally “half past”, e. However, it is always acceptable to pronounce the time using number words and the aforementioned “oh” convention, for example, 12:55 “twelve fifty-five”, 12:09 “twelve oh-nine”, 12:30 “twelve thirty”, and 12:15 “twelve fifteen”. This pronunciation is becoming more common. Proposed legislation aims to settle date debate”.

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 35: All-numeral dates and other brief forms”. Archived 2010-08-01 at the Wayback Machine. Statutes at Large, 28th Congress, 2nd Session, p. This article needs additional citations for verification. The legal and cultural expectations for date and time representation vary between countries, and it is important to be aware of the forms of all-numeric calendar dates used in a particular country to know what date is intended.

12″ can be interpreted as “10 November 2012” in the DMY format, “October 11, 2012” in MDY, and “2010 November 12” in YMD. Many countries have adopted it as their sole official date format, though even in these areas writers may adopt abbreviated formats that are no longer recommended. MDY in numeric-only form is never used. ISO 8601 is the only format that the Government of Canada and Standards Council of Canada officially recommend for all-numeric dates. English language publications and media companies as well as majority of English language government documents. DMY and MDY are used interchangeably.