How the date is written in English

Writing well in English is as important as speaking it correctly and to achieve this it is essential to know some very basic things in order to be able to work well in the language and to be fluent in order to communicate well. One of the most basic things we must learn to write in English is the date.

If you have doubts about how to correctly write a date in this widely spread language throughout the world, continue reading this .com article and discover how the date is written in English .

The date in English

For many people it is not easy to learn how to write the date in English correctly, since it is written differently to many other languages. To do it well we must know how to correctly write the ordinal numbers, the days of the week and the months in English. There is more than one structure for the date in English, which changes according to the English-speaking area in which we are. The correct forms, both short and long, to write the date in English are the following:

10/14/2016 (British English)

10/14/2016 (American English)

14 October 2016

Friday, October 14, 2016

Friday, October 14th, 2016

In the first short form of writing the date we see that only numbers are used and that the order is: day / month / year. In contrast, in the second short form the order changes: month / day / year.

The formal way to write the date in English are the long forms. There are three long ways to write the date correctly in English:

  1. The first form is the simplest and follows the order of the cardinal number of the day / month written with letters / year.
  2. The second long form is to put the day of the week / month in letters and the cardinal number of the day / year.
  3. The third long form, and also the most formal one, follows the order of the day of the week / month in letters and ordinal number of the day / year.

It is important to note that in the forms that include the day of the week, Friday in this case, commas are used to separate the day of the week and the year from the rest of the date.

Aspects to take into account when reading and writing the date in English

When reading the date in English it is important to think that the number accompanied by an abbreviation is read as an ordinal number like, for example, first when we see 1st. Instead, the year of a date reads like a cardinal number like, for example, when we see 2004 we read it as two thousand and four .

When we include the date in a text we must keep in mind how the prepositions are used for the dates in English . If we want to write months or years we will use the preposition in (you bought it in 2013), but if we want to express a day of the month we must write on (you bought it on 16th of January).

Basic words to write the date in English

In order to correctly rewrite the date in English it is necessary to know how some basic words and numbers are written correctly. For example, it is vital to know how the days of the week are written in English and keep in mind that they are always capitalized.

In addition, it is necessary to know how the ordinal numbers are written in English and we have to know that in the long dates the abbreviated form is used, that is, the number is written and then the abbreviation of the ordinal number "th" or "st".

We must also know how the months are written in English and that, like the days of the week, they are written in capital letters.