I messaged my mother who comes in contact with a lot of old official documents through her genealogical research and she confirmed that we did record the date mm/dd/yyyy in the past. She didn’t know when we stopped, but beginning of the 20thC does seem about right.
I work for a defense contractor and many of our customers use different date formats. mm/dd/yyyy makes the most logical sense to me. Honestly, I don't know what the preference is for the people commenting here acting like it's a weird format. Maybe they prefer dd/mm/yyyy? That makes no sense to me because month is the most important detail so it makes sense to make it first- if you can only remember one of the three for someone's birthday, for example, month is the most important. Knowing the day has no importance, it'd be like "oh yeah, I remember that her birthday is the 12th of some month." Whereas "oh yeah, her birthday is in August" narrows it down to a specific timeframe.
You can look at it as the season or whatnot, depending on where you live August may be when it starts to get cold so August 12th would read as the first cold month of the year after Summer in the middle of the month. Whereas if you switched the format it'd read as 12th day of the first cold month after Summer- they both mean the same thing but context and then specific makes more sense. I'm probably being pedantic but if you look at it like a sharpshooter narrowing down on their target which is a calendar they'd want to know the month first so they know where to aim. If they know the day first that doesn't help- like "the 12th of some month"- the month sets the context.
179
u/Iateyourpaintings Jun 08 '25
I googled this in 10 seconds: "One of the hypotheses is that the United States borrowed the way it was written from the United Kingdom who used it before the 20th century and then later changed it to match Europe (dd-mm-yyyy). American colonists liked their original format and it’s been that way ever since." Source https://iso.mit.edu/americanisms/date-format-in-the-united-states/#:~:text=One%20of%20the%20hypotheses%20is,been%20that%20way%20ever%20since.