MM/DD/YY is an exclusively American standard

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_date_formats_by_countr...

I have no idea why America settled on MM/DD/YY, which seems like absolutely the least intuitive permutation of D, M, and Y. Except perhaps MYD.

For a person born and raised in metric system, MM/DD/YY is just as bonkers as if someone decided that MM:HH:SS makes sense.

> Month day year makes sense because that's how people talk: I'll be there February 5, etc.

People also say "twelve past two" and yet you don't use 12:2:SS.

People only say "twelve past two" when they want to be formal and awkward.

It seems like it comes from an british convention of spelling dates "February 12, 2025" instead of the now more common "The 12th of February, 2025".

Like US customary units, imported from the british, but the UK modernized its system, not the US.

I've always thought it was because we say:

February Twelfth Two Thousand and Twenty Five

Feb 12 2025

02/12/2025

I know it's cool for Europeans ... and everyone else to hate on us for it but it does seem to make sense given the way we typically say the date.

To me its sounds better and more correct to say:

February 12th, 2025

Rather than:

12 February 2025

And is easier to say than:

The 12th of February 2025

So it's always been natural to write the numeric form the same way, but I am American. I can appreciate day first being easier to sort by machines and having an agreed upon international standard.

Just like the 4th of July, that most American of days

"The 4th of July" is more formal sounding, so it makes sense for the holiday, but many just say "July 4th" more informally when referring to the holiday.

Again grammatically is easier and shorter to say month day vs the day of month.

Canada uses this also, though we also use day-month-year and year-month-day.

Yes, this effectively makes dates nearly impossible to decipher here.

I have always dated things with months spelled for this reason. Except where the format is clearly defined, which is fairly common and likely for the same reason.

Agreed - MMDDYY is truly unintuitive but even DDMMYY is ambiguous if it’s early enough in the morning.

Day-Month-Year is the standard everywhere in the world apart from the US.

Big and little endian dates are the only way that makes sense I think. Doing it the US way where day is inexplicably between year and month just feels corrupted to my mind.

> Day-Month-Year is the standard everywhere in the world apart from the US.

IIRC, Japan uses Year-Month-Day, which is the other order which makes sense.

Not standard in China, Japan, Hungary, Mongolia, South Korea, Taiwan, and of course ISO 8601.

Using / as the delimiter with day/month/year is also very common. Here in Brazil, dd/mm/yyyy (or sometimes dd/mm/yy, which used to be more common before year 2000) is the standard.

And then problems happen!

DMY is the most common format internationally. There's a growing move (and ISO standard) for YMD but its a slow change, I think it's only North America that uses MDY.

ISO 8601 was set in 1988:

https://xkcd.com/1179/

Exactly the reason that you should always use yyyy-mm-dd.

yyyy-mm-dd is the most sensible, yes. For one thing, it sorts properly.

That’s the date format used in the UK

Small correction: that's the date format used by most every country except the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_date_formats_by_countr...

Why is it always americans who are caught with being seemingly unaware of the rest of the world? Is it because we all speak their language? I didn't ever see it with Britons or Australians.

Date format used everywhere apart from US.

Not everywhere. In Asia you find a lot of YYYY-MM-DD and similar.

And in eg Germany, too.