Why month date year

If you ask an American about the way their dates are formatted, you may get a response as defensive as 'my jumper is not on back to front, it's supposed to have the v at the back! But let's face it, it's weird. Basic group behaviour shows it's weird. Despite the variety of date formats used around world, the US is the only country to insist on using mm-dd-yyyy. This condition is diagnosed as middle-endianness.

It comes from computer science where bytes are arranged according to their size. If the order has larger ones at the front, it's known as big-endian and so too are dates formatted with the years first see the likes of China and Mongolia in the map above. In the fictional kingdom of Lilliput people have to open their soft-boiled eggs at the small end it's a royal decree.

Month abbreviation-Day-Year with leading zeros Feb Day-Month abbreviation-Year with leading zeros 17Feb Year-Month abbreviation-Day with leading zeros Feb Day-Month name-Year 17 February, Year-Month name-Day , February Month abbreviation, Day with leading zeros, Year Feb 17, Day with leading zeros, Month abbreviation, Year 17 Feb, Now we answer the eternal question.

The United States is the only nation in the world which insists on dates laid out as mm-dd-yyyy, although it is used occasionally in some other countries, including Canada and the Philippines. The historical reasons for the unusual date format are foggy -- but there are compelling explanations. America inherited the months-first dates from the United Kingdom where it was occasionally used until the early 20th century, according to Reddit.

American colonists favoured the monthly format, while the British Empire drifted towards the European style of dd-mm-yyyy. The American format did not cause as much confusion as the date was usually written out in full.