Year, month, and day
When is 10/8/12?
Is it October 8, 2021?
Is it August 10, 2012?
Or is it August 12, 2010?
I grew up in Spain and used to see and write down dates as day, month, and year—say, 15/10/24 for the fifteenth of October 2024.
In the US, the month goes first.
10/15/24 also represents October 15, 2024.
Digital systems put the year first, then format dates in human-readable forms adapted to regional patterns.
This means you'll see month/day/year in the United States region or day/month/year for Europe.1
For illustration, you can think of programming languages using the letters d for day (15), m for month, y for year, and other letters for other datetime components.
These codes allow programs to display present, past, and future dates to humans.
I caption sketches by hand and prefix the name of digital scans with yymmdd2—the year, month, and day when I draw them, which lets me browse drawings chronologically.
This often confuses people because dates appear flipped.3
10.01.18 may be interpreted as January 10, 2018, in Spain and October 1, 2018, in the US, whereas it represents January 18, 2010.
Next time you see one of my drawings, remember it's year, month, and day.
You can test this by changing your computer or phone's region. Nowadays, systems let you pick a calendar, date, and time format independently of the global setting of the machine, and you can use whatever you are more familiar with, regardless of the machine's region. ↩
Certain systems use
ddandmmto display two-digit day and month explicitly. The limitation of this format is that by living at the turn of the century, files from the 1990s are sorted after files from the 2000s. That is,920101(Jan 1, 1992) will show up after240101(Jan 1, 2024). The only way to fix this would be to prepend the entire year—19900101and20240101—but that makes too many digits. ↩I wrote this essay to point people here and avoid confusion. That may be you! ↩
