How do you write the date?

[Kalis]

Americans like to be backwards, just look at the imperial measurement aystem

Pedantic Nerd Fact: Americans do not use the Imperial System.

[coprax]

I would write 1st January 2007 as 1/1/7.

always use 2 digits!
1 looks terrible

[Sesshou]

All I know is that Japan reads from bottom to top/right to left,
If other Asian countries do the same, it's pretty logical.

Uh, thats not how Japan does it. You never read from bottom to top. IF the writing is done vertically, then you do read from right to left. If the writing is done horizontally, then you read from left to right.

Also for Japan as far as dates go, for lots of official things you use Heisei 27 instead of 2016.

[Kalis]

always use 2 digits!
1 looks terrible

No, 1/1/1 looks great written down as it looks like 11111 or /////.

[StPaul]

Here is a picture to illustrate the formats. You decide which one is looking normal

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

When writing: DD MM YYYY
When putting dates in file names: YYYYMMDD

[thedeacon]

Relevant xkcd. Pre-TLDR: China is doing it right, the rest of us do it wrong in different ways.

Numbers are Big Endian, meaning the more important parts come first. 42 is bigger than 24 because the first digit is ten times as important as the second. This is why when we sort/alphabetize we start with what comes first. It's natural to say dates like "October 25th" instead of "25th of October". The problem is we usually don't care about the year because it changes so infrequently. So when we do include the year it's tacked onto the end - "October 25th, 2015".

Europeans looked at that and rightly said INCONSISTENT! They made memes for facebook showing upside down broken pyramids (you know the one) and bragged that metric is better than imperial (no argument here) and said the solution is DD/MM/YYYY. They took a format that was half right, half wrong... and made it ALL wrong. Consistently wrong. Completely unsortable, and not how we read dates out loud anyway.

[muto]

I voted day, month, year, then realized I'm American and we write it month, day, year. I voted for the most logical sounding option, then realized that's not how I actually write it LOL.

[Elim Garak]

What do you ask the most:
1. What day it is
2. What month it is
3. What year it is

[Sentynel]

Day/Month/Year
6/7/2016
Wednesday/July/2016

sometimes I go like this: 2016, July 6

[Serath]

I use all 3 since I work internationally a lot but I'm an American so I voted M/D/Y. Honestly though I think Y/M/D is actually the best .

[Lawri]

Completely unsortable, and not how we read dates out loud anyway.

That's not how YOU read the dates out loud... We do. For me 6.7.2016 is "kuudes(6th) heinäkuuta(of july) kaksituhattakuusitoista(2016)"

[Draenox]

DD-MM-YY, like the rest of europe

[Treeskee]

Day/Month/Year

[Iamashaman]

Day/month/year! It's the only way too do it!

[Ealyssa]

The logical way

YAAAAAY

[Deleted]

It's the sixth of July.

Not July the sixth, because that is factually incorrect as July is the seventh.

[Deathquoi]

I don't understand why Americans use M/D/Y, it's not the most logical.

It has to do with the way we say and write the date longhand. We wouldn't say 6th July, 2016, it's July 6th, 2016. Therefore, it's 7/6/2016. There is logic to it, even though it's different.

[Deleted]

Like a sensible person, small to large, not medium, small, large.

[Deathquoi]

It's the sixth of July.

Not July the sixth, because that is factually incorrect as July is the seventh.

What the hell?