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A date in a calendar is a reference to a particular day by means of a calendar system. The calendar date allows the particular day to be identified. A person can often determine how many days a particular date comes after another date. For example, "February 17, 2003", is ten days after "February 7, 2003", in the Gregorian calendar. In most calendar systems, the date consists of three parts: the year, the month, and the day of month. There may also be additional parts, such as the day of week. Years are usually counted from a particular starting point, usually called an era, but sometimes an epoch. A date without the year part may also be referred to as a date or calendar date (such as "February 7" rather than "February 7, 2003"). As such it defines the days of an annual festival, such as a birthday or Christmas on December 25.
Date formatRelated to the classification of a day as a specific calendar date is the format used to express that date. Even for any specific calendar system, different formats are used. For example, the following formats all express the same date in the Gregorian calendar: Forms starting with the dayThis sequence is common to a larger number of countries.
Forms starting with the year
Forms starting with the monthThis sequence is common to a smaller number of countries.
This order, from traditional England, is used in the United States and countries with U.S. influence. But the U.S. federal government uses day, month and year. England switched to that sequence around 1900. Canada uses both two conventions, those starting with the day and those starting with the month. Many Internet sites use year/month/day, and those using other conventions write out the month (16-NOV-2001) so there is no ambiguity. These are further complicated by common practices of abbreviating the year to its final two digits and abbreviating the full name of the month to its initial three letters, with or without a period. At least in the United States, dates are rarely written in purely numerical forms in formal writing. When numbers are used to represent months, a significant amount of confusion can arise from the ambiguity of a date order; especially with when the numbers representing the day, month or year are low, it can be impossible to tell which order is being used. This can be clarified by using four digits to represent years. The ISO 8601 date order, with four-digit years, is specifically chosen to be unambiguous. Some people say that the order starting with the month is illogical, because it does not indicate the units in order of size, either increasing or decreasing. (day, month, year) is used by:
y/m/d (year, month, day), the ISO 8601 standard, is used by:
m/d/y (month, day, year) is used by:
Day and year onlyThe U.S. military sometimes uses a system that indicates the year and day, but not the month. For example, "December 10, 1999," can be written in some contexts as "9345", for the 345th day of 1999. This system is most often used on forms.
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