Date Utterance: Calendar in Words

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How to Use

  • Initially, the day, month, and year inputs will be filled by today's date.
  • We can change each one accordingly.
  • Hit ▶️ RUN (or hit Enter) to show the wording of that particular date.
  • There are two styles available: British and American.
  • Hit 🔃 SET NOW to set the inputs with current date.
  • We can select and copy the result simply by clicking the output.

Use Date Utterance as Your Reference

You can simply copy the URL from the address bar to share the wording of a particular date.

Limitation

  • Maximum year is 275,760, adhering JavaScript's 8.64 × 1015 milliseconds after epoch (epoch = 1 January 1970, 00:00:00 UTC).

    It is said that it was selected arbitrarily by Unix engineers because it was considered a convenient date to work with.

    🤔

  • Minimum year is -271,821 ➡️ 271821 B.C.
    It is quite hilarious for B.C. (Before Christ) — or B.C.E. (Before Common Era) — period to have Gregorian calendar. And thus, I added it. And also for the year zero (0).

History

Back in the day, both British and American English speakers used "the 4th of July" style. You see it in British documents, and even early American ones.

The traditional English usage, even in informal settings, followed day–month–year, both in writing and in general conversation.

Even when spoken casually, as in:

  • the 5th of November
  • the 11th of March
  • 25th December

Even today, you'd hear British folk say, He was born on the fourteenth of June, nineteen eighty-two.

Whereas the Yank equivalent would default to, June fourteen(th), eighty-two.

Above application only does the swap.

America's date format – Month/Day/Year — emerged largely from bureaucratic and printing practices during the 18th and 19th centuries.

It stems from their habit of flipping the order in casual speech. Like "July 4th" instead of "4th of July" as a speech habit.

Why? Because saying the month first implies the season, the broad context. July? Ah, summer! Then follow with the exact date. From there, that tiny quirk of speech-first writing became codified into forms, ledgers, government records, and later... software.

It's a bit mental if we think about it, because it applies only to that region — the season reasoning.

We normally write the time with logical progression: Hour:Minute:Second. Imagine, for reasons, Minute:Hour:Second — because a pancake should be done in 2 minutes.

I guess flipping is needed for pancakes.

Then there'd be a standard for time, called Pancake Time 9000 by Pastry und Such Digital Bureaux Onward Tiger Computing. 🐯

☎️ The support line:

Thank you for calling Tiger. For crumpet sync, press 1. For waffle latency, press 2. For cinnamon overflow... please hold.

To summarise:

🇺🇸 USA

Format: MM/DD/YYYY

Used by: Only them.

  • Legacy of spoken quirk.
  • Confusing to everyone else.
  • Conflicts with all sorting logic.
  • "Land of the free"... of sorting logic. But also, the chief exporter of software infrastructure to the rest of the world and the leading global entertainer and narrative authority of the modern world. 👀

We have ISO 8601 format: YYYY-MM-DD. Which was published in 1988 by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). But guess who strongly influenced its formation? The American National Standards Institute (ANSI): the U.S. military and computer industry + IBM and other software giants.

Thus publicly, Americans write "July 4, 1776". But privately, in software and systems, their tech institutions helped pioneer the very standard they refuse to use at checkout counters or birthday invites.

"International Organization for Standardization" (ISO), founded in 1947, based in Geneva, Switzerland — neutral, you'd think — and yet, the name is spelled with Z. Switzerland has French, German, Italian, and Romansh — none of which has that bloody "The ‘Z’ Coup d'État".

Other:

The overall DD-MM-YYYY or MM/DD/YYYY is called a "date", right? And the DD part is the "day" of that date.

But! When I chunk either format, label each, the DD is not "day" — because it's not Monday, Tuesday, or Friday. Instead, it's the "date" — since it is the ordinal number of a date. It's like this:

Date contains date, which is not the day, but the day is part of the date, not the weekday.

🤷‍♂️ Things.

Interesting, are they not?

Things!

(1 = D#)