Dating made easy

They say there’s more than one way to skin a cat. There are certainly a lot of ways to write a date. The Brits do it one way, the Americans another.

Variety
The Brits write their dates in this order:

• Day / Month / Year

So Christmas Day this year is 25/12/06.
The Americans spin the day and month around:

• Month / Day / Year

So this year they refer to Christmas Day as 12/25/06.

In these examples it’s still easy to work out the date even if you aren’t aware of the different ways of formatting it, because there are not 25 months in the year. But if you get 08/09/06 confusion can easily creep in.

Simple solution
Thankfully, there’s one universal date-writing format which everyone can understand – and it’s easy.

The answer is to write the month in full.

25 December 2006 or December 25 2006

Some date downfalls to be aware of

• Months always start with a capital letter in English.
  • March (NOT march)
• Never write 25. December 2006 – a full-stop means the end of a sentence to an English reader.
• When we say a date, we always say ’the’ and ’of’ – but we don’t write them. So, although we say the 15th of March, we only write 15 March.

 

 

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WordNerd
15 March (actually 14 March in the modern calendar) is known as the Ides of March – a lucky day in the Roman calendar. It’s famous because Julius Caesar, despite being forewarned, was assassinated on the Ides of March, 44 BC.