Why do american's always put the month first then the day then the year ?

It’s the way we’re taught. I don’t know the origin of this practice. We also use our eating utensils differently from Europeans. And some of us were brought up using chopsticks or bread instead. People have different customs, and I don’t see that there’s a need for anyone to be wrong.

No one is right and no one is wrong. My mother is an American and does everything the American way. My father is an American who was raised in British boarding schools (aka “public schools”) and he does most things the British way.

My siblings and I do things in a variety of ways. However, I always tend to write out at least the first three letters of the month so folks know which practice I am following.

It is simply one more example of how America and Britain are divided by a common language.

America is right, we are always right and if you oppose us we will blow you up….

CHANGE MAKES ME MAD!!!

Good job we don’t have anything you want then or YOU would start another war !
America is not always right you know .

The United States standard is to write the date how it would be read out loud (e.g. 3/14/09 = “March fourteenth, two-thousand and nine”). Many other countries stick to the traditional way of writing the date… just because it’s traditional… and often thought to be more formal.

Always? I’m American and I write the date as 2009–04-22 or 22 April 2009 or 22 Apr 2009. It depends on the context for me.

@McHobbes How it would be read out loud is the 21st april (the fourth ) 2009

The written formats seem to have grown out of the conventional way of speaking the dates (as @McHobbes and @sandystrachan just demonstrated), but there doesn’t seem to have been a clear preference in Britain for the day-first order until around 1900. Before that, it’s not at all unusual to find dates written “American-style” (e.g. from 1898: “GEORGE I. [reigned] from Sunday, August 1st, 1714, to Saturday, June 11th, 1727”).

At the time of the American colonies, then, it would have been considered acceptable British English to write the month first. Note that the Declaration of Independence is dated “July 4th, 1776”. England then went on to standardize to the day-first format, whereas the Yanks stuck with the month-first format.

The ISO standard says: YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm. I don’t think it matters much, unless computer programs are involved.

I’m an American and I don’t write the date in that order unless i’m filling out paperwork with specific boxes. I think it was clearly hit on the head already that it’s just a custom. There are lots of customs in lots of parts of the world. Why don’t we use metric? Why do Britons drive on the left? Why is British chocolate inherently better than ours? Okay I can’t prove that one, but still! hehe. Point being, I don’t think anyone is “right” or “wrong”.

@adreamofautumn – actually, the very best chocolate is Swiss (but you have to be in Switzerland to get any.

@bea2345 That’s why shops import chocolates, from there so you don’t have to live there. And there is the great place called internet.

@bea2345 I would rank German high on the list too, but in my comparison to the UK they won over the US haha.

@sandystrachan – Ah, but you see, they don’t export the very best. There was this tiny shop, back in 1979, in Geneva, run by two ladies. All they sold were chocolates of many kinds, most of which were created in-house. The one I remember, and think about with an ache of longing (after all these years) was the marrons glacees – have I got it right?, a perfect globe of chocolate filled with chestnut paste – they were so expensive that I could only buy them one at a time.

i don’t think either is right or wrong – both express the date in ways that people can understand.
just one of those regional things.
i’m an american, living in the U.S., and i almost always write my dates day month year. maybe it’s because we were required to do so in french when i took that class, but i like it better anyway.

Originally, the date was said “April the 22nd” just like Americans do. But then the year went first (when needed). Nothing wrong with 2009/4/22. The problem is that Americans swapped only half of the date, putting the year last, ie 4/22/2009. Which is obviously confusing for the rest of the world who write it as 22/4/2009. Both systems are logical if they are consistent, it’s the inconsistency of the American system that makes it confusing.

Also, in the arabic numerals, numbers are written from left-to-right, which for them is backwards (since they write right-to-left). We kept their order for the numbers, even though we write in the opposite direction. After a while, our “four and twenty” (which should have been written 42) became “twenty four” (written 24). Germans still say the old numbers, yet write them backwards.

(ok I know this was confusing, but it will make sense if you try it out)

My mum has an old degree which starts something like “in the year of the Lord Seventh and Sixtieth and NineHundredth and Thousandth, on the Sixth Month, on the Third and Twentieth Day”. All it means is that she graduated on 23/6/67.

The military standard (I think also the international standard) format is: YYYYMMDDhhmmz where Y=year, M=month, D=date, h=hour (24 hour format) m=minute, and z=time zone designated by a letter.

For example:

201212211111Z will be 11:11 am Zulu time (Greenwich time zone) on December 21, 2012

@Yetanotheruser Now why did you bring up the date we will all die as an example. Now I have to get me a beer, calm down, stare at the wall and twitch with my left eye lid.~

I was wondering if anyone would notice. Let’s check this out