Calendar Wiki
Register
Advertisement
Wikipedia This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original article was at Date format by country. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with the Calendar Wikia, the text of Wikipedia is available under Creative Commons License. See Wikia:Licensing.


This page gives an overview of date formats by country.

The legal and cultural expectations for date and time representation vary between countries, and it is important to be aware of the forms of all-numeric calendar dates used in a particular country to know what date is intended.

Writers have traditionally written abbreviated dates according to their local custom, creating all-numeric equivalents to day–month formats such as "5 March 2024" (05/03/24, 05/03/2024, 05-03-2024 or 05.03.2024) and month–day formats such as "March 5, 2024" (03/05/24 or 03/05/2024). This can result in dates that are impossible to understand correctly without knowing the context. For instance, depending on the order style, the abbreviated date "01/11/06" can be interpreted as "1 November 2006" for DMY, "January 11, 2006" for MDY, and "2001 November 6" for YMD.

The ISO 8601 format YYYY-MM-DD ({{#time:Y-m-d) is intended to harmonize these formats and ensure accuracy in all situations. Many countries have adopted it as their sole official date format, though even in these areas writers may adopt abbreviated formats that are no longer recommended.

Map[]

Date format by country

Listing[]

Table coding[]

All examples use example date 2021-03-31 / 2021 March 31 / 31 March 2021 / March 31, 2021 – except where a single-digit day is illustrated.

Basic components of a calendar date for the most common calendar systems:

D – day
M – month
Y – year

Specific formats for the basic components:

yy – year of century, e.g. 21
yyyy – full year, e.g. 2021
m – month number, e.g. 3
mm – two-digit month, e.g. 03
mmm – abbreviation of month name, e.g. Mar
mmmm – month name spelled out in full, e.g. March
d – day of the month, e.g. 2
dd – two-digit day of the month, e.g. 02
ddd – abbreviation for day of the week, e.g. Fri or Fr
dddd – day of the week spelled out in full, e.g. Friday

Separators of the components:

/ – oblique stroke (slash)
. – full stop, dot or point (period)
- – hyphen (dash)
– space

External links[]

  • Index of NLS information page Global Development and Computing Portal, published by Microsoft. Links on page lead to individual country date formats.
Advertisement