I’ve lived in China, Europe, and the United States. So I’ve experienced all three forms of the date format. Which would be YYYY/MM/DD, DD/MM/YYYY, and MM/DD/YYYY respectively. Europeans tend to have a superiority complex about their systems for most thing, and rightfully so in most cases such as the Metric system. However, their date format is one I actually disagree with. I’m going to present the argument that the American date format is the optimal and most practical date format to be used on a day to day basis.

YYYY/MM/DD is the superior date format for actual data sorting. It allows you to sort data chronologically by name, hence why it is the international standard (ISO). This is what programmers use, this is what data scientists use. It’s the most practical format from a statistical standpoint. However it is not super useful in colloquial use. Most of the time, we reference dates within the context of our current year. So stating the year in the very front is not very important.

So that brings us to MM/DD and DD/MM. And there are actually a lot of reasons why MM/DD is way better than DD/MM. First of all, at least in English, the vocalization of DD/MM would require the additional word “of”. Saying March 10th is much faster than saying the tenth of March. I recognize this is not relevant for languages that do not operate this way such as Italian or French where you simply say the date number and the month immediately proceeding it. But languages such as English and Spanish greatly benefit from the MM/DD format.

Secondly, it’s more important to state the month first if it is a date that will happen in a separate month. People tend to perceive time in chunks. Knowing that my friend’s birthday is on the 26th of November isn’t actually relevant until I reach close to November. Doing things such as planning gifts or a party become relevant dependent on the month time frame. So stating the day before the month is extraneous.

“But what if someone is trying to tell you a date within the same month then?” You ask me. Well in that case most people don’t bother with the month at all. If there’s an event happening next Tuesday, you would say “next Tuesday.” If it were further away, such as 3 weeks from today, you’d still want to stress if it was in this month or the next month, since people perceive time in chunks. So once again, it’s more useful to state the month first and date second.

In other words, I think most Europeans are just appealing to their sense of familiarity when they advocate for DD/MM/YYYY. There really isn’t a clear advantage of using that format and in all honestly. It literally does not matter that much, and the only reason people get mad about it at all, is the inconvenience having to figure out which format someone is using. The international standard is already YYYY/MM/DD. It makes much more sense for everyone to just use MM/DD. Since most of the time, the year is not relevant in every day speech. Colloquially, both Asia and the Americas already use MM/DD so it’s really the Europeans who are the odd ones out.