I wish we could all agree on one way of writing dates in number form.
Let's use January 23, 2016 as our example.
In America and Canada, the date is formally written in month/day/year form; thus 01/23/2016 or 01/23/16.
In much of Europe, the date is written out in day/month/year format; thus 23/01/2016 or 23/01/16.
Many countries have adopted the ISO standard of year-month-day; thus 2016/01/23.
For Business purposes, the date should always be written in full; thus January 23, 2016.
If I saw 12/01/2016, would it be referring to December 01 or January 12?
No wonder/Little wonder/Not surprisingly I feel a little confused...
SO...
How do you write the dates using numbers?
And tell us what country you're from.
Alina, Sid, Dan, Paul, Renee, Sudeep, Laura, Mah...
I do want you all to know that I gave all of you a Thumbs Up, as I always do in appreciation of anyone who responds to my Discussions.
Unfortunately, someone (and it may be obvious who that someone is) removed my thumbs up by giving everyone a thumbs down for no justifiable reason.
I do appreciate and respect your comments and I thank you...
This matter confuses me a LOT just like you Richard!
Especially when buying my groceries because expiry dates matter a lot ;)
In Jordan, dates are written in the form of day/month/year. Like you and
the others, I wish the world agrees on one method, that would make our
life easier :)
When I am certain that I am writing for a U.S. audience, I use the customary U.S. form. As I write this, today's date is 10/5/2016. It's crazy and illogical, but it is what it is. I always use four digits for the year, partly because I was a software engineer and sensitive about Y2K issues, and partly because until we get past the year 2031, a two-digit year could be confused with a day-of-month number.
When I am writing for an international audience, I use the ISO-8601 format, specifically yyyy-mm-dd, with four digits for the year and a hyphen as a separator. Today is 2016-10-05.
When I have room, and a non-numeric form is allowed, I use the form you recommend "for business purposes," October 5th, 2016. This is instantly recognizable to U.S. speakers. I have no idea how it looks to non-U.S. speakers, but it is unambiguous--it is perfectly clear which is the month, the day, and the year, and the names of the months are fairly similar in many European languages.
The following link is very informative:
Date Format by Country - from Wikipedia - based on 189 References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country
In Iran :
Year / month / day
For example :
1993 / 2 / 23
(:
