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The USofA is the bizarre exception here:

  The United States has a rather unique way of writing the date that is imitated in very few other countries (although Canada and Belize do also use the form). In America, the date is formally written in month/day/year form.
They don't use metric, still use First Past the Post voting, elect a mini monarch with effectively unchecked powers, ... it's an odd place.


Also, the US military used/uses DDMMMYYYY format, i.e., 15JAN2025, where MMM is the month abbreviation, which is similar to one of the formats used in Romania. This has the benefits of unambiguous parsing and no need for component separators but lacks lexicographical sort-ability like ISO 8601. A format like YYYYMMMDD might some of the advantages of ISO 8601 by keeping items of the same year and month together at a minimum. (ISO 8601 is the most proper date format though. ;)


The thing is, lexigraphical sorting is something that can be easily parsed, parse the date and sort it how you want.

The standard was for written and radio communication to be unambiguous.

If you're writing software, believe me you want a format like 13FEB2025 over anything except maybe unix timestamp in UTC.


Don't oversell the place. It also has it's down-sides.


Mass shootings, out-of-control police, bankruptcies from for-profit healthcare and expensive medications, Bibles and Creationism in public schools, widespread ignorance about the world and just about everything, and millions (vastly undercounted) of homeless people.

But seriously, America is awesome for rich people if you don't mind living in a poor, third-world country that still believes it's a first-world, exceptional country.


Think you might have missed the parent poster's sarcasm.


Good, stay out then. It'll do just fine without you


"America is awesome for ambitious people" FTFY


Africa of North


We write the date that way because that's how we say the dates and conversation: today is February 13th, 2025.

02/13/2025. I personally use ISO dates because i like getting sorting for free.


Ah yes, the famous American holiday of July 4th ;)




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