User:Aaronmg2/sandbox/Date format by country

The Gregorian calendar date can be written in multiple ways.

Fully-written dates
The date may be written in a variety of ways, the most common of which in English are:


 * DMY – Day, Month, Year – e.g. 


 * MDY – Month, Day, Year – e.g. MDY

In some other languages, notably East Asian languages, the date is written:


 * YMD – Year, Month, Day – e.g. YMD

In English, the United States and Canada usually use MDY, while most other countries use DMY. International organisations tend to use DMY, e.g. the UN and WHO. However, some use MDY e.g. the World Bank.

Most modern style guides advise against the use of ordinal numbers (e.g. 1st January or ), though they may still be seen.

All-numeric dates
Due to the lack of uniformity across the globe, confusion can arise when dates are put into a purely numerical value. Take for example 01 February – in English, it may be written 01/02 or 02/01. The most common solutions to this are either avoiding all-numeric dates altogether or using the ISO 8601 date format.

Date Separators
In an all-numeric date, the days, months and years can be separated in a variety of ways.

The most common of these in English is the slash:

31/12/1999

Other punctuation marks used include:

31.12.1999 (dot)

31-12-1999 (hyphen)

31 12 1999 (space)

ISO 8601
The ISO 8601 date format is written all-numerically, YMD with hyphens – e.g. ISO.

It was created to ease international data communication. This style is most common in computing e.g. in databases. It is not used in prose writing.

Table
Below is a table showing the predominant format used in prose writing. Note that the ISO format is common in almost all countries regarding computing, databases, tabular information etc.