When we speak the date, we say "December 31st, 2005." The numerical version goes in the same order as the spoken version. Skimming through the Regional and Language Options in Windows' Control Panel, it looks like month-day-year is the most common, followed by year-month-day.

well, I spent about 3 hours on the 'net yesterday trying to find the origin of this date format thing and found absolutely nothing, so matter how I phrased it. lots of rants about which was 'better' but no history. i did find one little bit of history that is probably unrelated but it's the only clue that I found. Many years ago, the Quakers in the USA, I think before it was even the USA, stopped using the names of the days of the weeks and the months because of the associations with 'false gods.' Instead of writing, for example, May 13, 1760, they would write 13d, 5m, 1760, or 5m, 13d, 1760. This is complicated by the fact that the system of numbering the months changed round about that time from using March as the first month of the year to using January. So many old records have to be used with care in determining actual dates that correspond to today's date system. The solution, of course, is to go with ISO 8601, which is a little-endian format. Today's date would then read 2006-08-03, or 20060803. Given that the USA isn't even on the metric system yet, I believe that they would view this standard as yet another attempt to impose 'world government'; paranoia knows no bounds, sometimes. http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/popstds/datesandtime.html Did we learn nothing from Y2K?

Probably just a custom evolved in certain communities/cultures/nations. They may also reflect the syntax of the language, as well, if you think about it. For example, I would say "I'm running up the stairs" in standard English here in the States. However, a direct, litteral translation of the same statement from German to English would be "I'm running the stairs up." A different syntax. Here in the States we also write an address on a letter in the following fashion: Name House number, street name City, State, Zip code In Germany: Name Street name, house number Postal Code, locality Germany

Now, many nations are switching to "year/month/day" ... 2005/12/31 ...

On e thing that I've grown accustomed to much to the chagrin of others is using the DD/MM/YY format. Spoken would be 31 December 2005 (31, not 31st), and written 31 DEC 05.

not sure. for some reason i do that mmddyy on formal stuff but whenever i took notes or anything for my personal preference, it was always ddmmyy