Dates and years in words
Pick a date and read it every way it is usually written: in figures, day first or month first, in words, and with the year read in full or in pairs.
Any date from the year 1 to 9999.
- Day first
- Month first
- With an ordinal
- With the weekday
- , or
- Year first (ISO 8601)
- The year in full
- The year in pairs
Day first or month first
The same day is 25 September 2026 or September 25, 2026, and each is the everyday order somewhere. The four free style guides quoted below split two and two. Neither order is a mistake, and with the month's name in it neither can be misread: the W3C's note on date formats says of a date written with the month's name and a four-digit year, “This method is completely unambiguous.” For a date in figures only, the Google guide says: “If you must express a date in numerical date format, use the format YYYY-MM-DD”, which is 2026-09-25 here.
| Guide | What it says | This date |
|---|---|---|
| GOV.UK A to Z style guide | “do not use a comma between the month and year - for example: 4 June 2017” | 25 September 2026 |
| Guardian style guide | “Our style is: 21 July 2016 (day month year; no commas).” | 25 September 2026 |
| Microsoft Style Guide | “Use the following format for dates: month day, year, as in July 31, 2016.” | September 25, 2026 |
| Google developer documentation style guide | “In general, spell out the names of months and days of the week in full. Give the full four-digit year, not a two-digit abbreviation. Recommended: January 19, 2017” | September 25, 2026 |
The rest of what these guides say about numbers is set side by side in what the style guides say about numbers.
Ordinals in dates
Written out in words, the day becomes an ordinal: the twenty-fifth of September, two thousand and twenty-six, or September twenty-fifth, two thousand twenty-six. In figures the guides differ. The Microsoft Style Guide says “Don't use ordinal numbers (such as 1st, 12th, or 23rd) to indicate a date”, and the GOV.UK and Guardian examples above write the day as a plain number too. The tool also gives the ordinal in figures, for a letter or an invitation that wants it: 25th September 2026 in British English, and September 25th, 2026 in American English, month first. Cambridge's English Grammar Today gives both, “on 1st June. or … on June 1st”, and says “In written American English, the month of the date comes before the day and year.”
The “day of” form, the twenty-fifth day of September, two thousand and twenty-six, spells the whole date out in words, day, month and year. Where only one part of a date is an ordinal, it is the day.
Saying the year
A year can be read as the number it is, two thousand and twenty-six, or in pairs of digits, as twenty twenty-six. The Guardian style guide takes a side for its own podcasts: “Should you have occasion to say 2016 out loud, for example in a podcast, pronounce it ‘twenty sixteen’, not ‘two thousand and sixteen’.” The full reading follows the British and American split every number here follows: British English puts “and” before the last part, American English does not.
Read in pairs, a round century takes “hundred” and a single digit after the century takes “oh”. Cambridge's English Grammar Today gives “1700: seventeen hundred” and “1908: nineteen oh eight”, and for the years after 2000 it gives both readings: “2003: two thousand and three or twenty oh three” and “2012: two thousand and twelve or twenty twelve”. It gives 2000 itself only as “two thousand”, and the tool reads a round thousand in full.
| Year | In full, British | In full, American | In pairs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1066 | one thousand and sixty-six | one thousand sixty-six | ten sixty-six |
| 1900 | one thousand nine hundred | one thousand nine hundred | nineteen hundred |
| 1905 | one thousand nine hundred and five | one thousand nine hundred five | nineteen oh five |
| 1984 | one thousand nine hundred and eighty-four | one thousand nine hundred eighty-four | nineteen eighty-four |
| 2000 | two thousand | two thousand | none: read in full |
| 2005 | two thousand and five | two thousand five | twenty oh five |
| 2016 | two thousand and sixteen | two thousand sixteen | twenty sixteen |
| 2026 | two thousand and twenty-six | two thousand twenty-six | twenty twenty-six |
| 2100 | two thousand one hundred | two thousand one hundred | twenty-one hundred |