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Short format: dd/mm/yyyy (Day first, month number and year in left-to-right writing direction) in Afar, French and Somali ("d/m/yy" is a common alternative). Gregorian dates follow the same rules but tend to be written in the yyyy/m/d format (Day first, month number, and year in right-to-left writing direction) in Arabic language.
The Chicago Manual of Style discourages writers from writing all-numeric dates, other than the year-month-date format advocated by ISO 8601, as it is not comprehensible to readers outside the United States. [5] [6] The day-month-year order has been increasing in usage since the early 1980s.
In most calendar systems, the date consists of three parts: the (numbered) day of the month, the month, and the (numbered) year. There may also be additional parts, such as the day of the week. Years are usually counted from a particular starting point, usually called the epoch, with era referring to the span of time since that epoch. [b]
The order in which the year, month, and day are represented. (Year-month-day, day-month-year, and month-day-year are the common combinations.) How weeks are identified (see seven-day week) Whether written months are identified by name, by number (1–12), or by Roman numeral (I-XII). Whether the 24-hour clock, 12-hour clock, or 6-hour clock is ...
Usually, use noon and midnight rather than 12 pm and 12 am; whether "midnight" refers to the start or the end of a date should be explicitly specified unless clear from the context. Where several times that are all a.m. or all p.m. appear in close proximity, then a.m. or p.m. need be given only once if there is no risk of confusion.
Dates are traditionally and most commonly written in day–month–year (DMY) order: [1] [2] 31 December 1999; 31/12/99; Formal style manuals discourage writing the day of the month as an ordinal number (for example "31st December"), except with an incomplete reference, such as "They set off on 12 August 1960 and arrived on the 18th".
When writing the full date, English speakers vacillate between the forms inherited from the United Kingdom (day first, 7 January) and United States (month first, January 7), depending on the region and context. French speakers consistently write the date with the day first (le 7 janvier) like the rest of the French-speaking world. The ...
The 24-hour notation is used in writing with an h as a separator (h for heure, meaning hour). Example: 14 h 05 (1405 [14:05] hours or 2:05 pm). Though the correct form includes spaces on both sides of the h, it is common to see them omitted: 14h05. The minutes are usually written with two digits; the hour numbers can be written with or without ...