Learn English – Date format differences: “1 January(,) 2018” versus “1st January(,) 2018”

dates

I have seen four different styles on how to format a date:

  1. 1 January 2018
  2. 1 January, 2018
  3. 1st January 2018
  4. 1st January, 2018

Which is used when and where? Which are common and why are there these four different types?

Best Answer

The formats "1 January 2018" and "1st January 2018" are both widespread in Britain.

Including a comma before the year is less common and most style guides recommend against it. It has the undesirable effect that if you start a sentence with "On 1st January, 2018", you'll probably end up also putting a comma after "2018", and whether you do or not, it just looks odd. If you use commas both before and after "2018", it then looks as though the year is a parenthetical aside (set off by commas), and yet if you omit the second comma it looks as though the year belongs to the portion of the sentence after the comma rather than the portion before it.

Using superscript for the ordinal suffix is optional.

British speakers always pronounce the "1" as "the first" even when the date is written without the ordinal suffix. The word "of" is almost always pronounced, too, even though not written.

In American English, "January 1, 2018" is a common style, and including the comma is pretty much mandatory because otherwise you have two numbers coming together in an unpleasant or confusing way.

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