How to write date range succinctly and unambiguously in American written English?
In a sentence I usually use "from January 1, 1923 through December 31, 1986". But it is too long for use in section titles.
It is relatively easy to find documentation on single date formatting compliant to standards and conventions for different locales. But I can't seem to find standards on date ranges formatting.
For example, for American English, how to format a date range so it's both succinct and unambiguous?
If the ends have different years, both should show up, e.g. 5/1/2011 - 5/4/2012
.
What if the two years are same? I don't like 5/12/2012 - 7/21/2012
as it repeats the year unnecessarily; 5/12 – 7/21/2012 seems odd too. Any suggestions?
Best Answer
Many airlines codify the dates in terms of
DDMMMYY
but with explicit reference to the month name instead of the month number. For example, your example could be represented as01JAN23-31DEC86
. Depending on the space and the context you could give yourself a some rope and expand the items a little bit. Given the particular nature that in this case both dates belong to another century, you could be a little more specific:01JAN1923-31DEC1986
. If you can spare some more space, maybe some spaces would be fine to make a clearer reading:01 JAN 1923 - 31 DEC 1986
. Another detail could be turning all those caps in month names to normal capitalization, as in01 Jan 1923 - 31 Dec 1986
. You could even drop the leading 0s1 Jan 1923 - 31 Dec 1986
.On the other hand, I've found this guide on date ranges. The following is just an extract, as there are more considerations when dealing with ranges with different lengths.
Hope it helps.