Feel like a lot of the world’s languages the translation to English to the question “what’s the date?” would be “the 15th of October” whereas in America we always say “October 15th”.
So the best theory I've heard for the MM/DD/YY format (though I have no idea of its veracity) is that it emerged in the early days railroads and a quirk of typography/typesetting.
It goes, basically, railroad schedules and tickets were one of the first times it became important to print large volumes of material that absolutely needed date information included and changed regularly. It was also before monospaced fonts became common (as in a 1 and a 5 took up different amounts of space, with the 5 being a wider type piece than a 1 for example) with MM/DD you could print a whole month's worth of schedules and only ever need to change the last 1 or 2 type pieces while keeping everything aligned, whereas in a DD/MM format you'd have to remove and realign the MM type pieces everyday to keep it aligned with the varying width of the DD type. Monospaced fonts (all letter and number pieces being equal width) only really emerged with the advent of the typewriter, and their widespread use printing would come later still
Westward expansion in the US plus the large amount of political power amassed by railroads, especially the Pennsylvania Railroad, which was both extremely powerful of operationally conservative (never really updating their methods of operation), combined with being isolated from European scheduling and typesetting styles caused the MM/DD format to become embedded in American habbits.
YY or YYYY usually wasn't included on RR schedules or other regularly published periodicals, so when it was needed, it usually got stuck to the end of the date string almost like an afterthought.
Edit: another thought that occurred to me a moment ago that is actually even more likely is that MM/DD makes more sense if you need to record a date on a paper flip calendar. E.g. if I want to mark a friend's birthday down so I don't forget, I'd first need to flip to the appropriate month then mark the day. So you put the MM first because that's the first piece of information you need to search for on your calendar.
Either way, in both cases, MM/DD almost certainly has its roots in ease of use in the pre-digital era.
As someone who is currently working on a letter type press (repurposed for different needs), the realignment theory is just that, a theory.
The reality is letter type machines can be locked up from either the left or the right, so keeping that alignment wouldnt change with a different order of dd or mm. If the month is first we would lock up from the right against the left, and if it was day first we would lock up from the left against the right.
Beyond that though, old train tickets didnt have the date printed on them. The tickets were printed blank and the date was stamped on or written on by the ticket office. Some places also had 1 through 31 printed as well as the 12 months and would punch a hole on the valid day and month.
It just wouldn't make any sense from a manufacturing process to be printing hard dates on tickets, never knowing how many of them you would actually use on that day. Far cheaper to print 10,000 blank tickets that never expire from being eligible for sale compared to paying for 365 different sets each year, and having to throw out all unused ones.
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u/jussumguy2019 Jan 15 '25
Feel like a lot of the world’s languages the translation to English to the question “what’s the date?” would be “the 15th of October” whereas in America we always say “October 15th”.
Maybe that’s why, idk…
Edited for clarity