How to write and read dates in English

One more step towards your success in IELTS

by Mehdi Safavi | Jul 13, 2019 | Listening, Speaking, Writing

Writing dates may differ from one language to another. Do you know how to write dates correctly in English? For success in IELTS, it is very important to learn the right date formats especially for the listening and writing modules of IELTS.

Writing

In Britain, the commonest way to write the day’s date is as follows:

30 March 2004 27 July 2003

(Note that the names of months always begin with capital letters.)

The last two letters of the number word are sometimes added (e.g. Ist, 2nd, 3rd, 6th). Some people write a comma before the year, but this is no longer very common in Britain except when the date comes inside a sentence.

30th March(,) 2004

He was born in Tokyo on 14 December, 1942.

The date may also be written entirely in figures.

30/3/04 30-3-04 30.3.04

In the USA, it is common to write the month first and to put a comma before the year.

March 30, 2004

All-figure dates are written differently in Britain and America, since British people put the day first, while Americans generally start with the month. So for example, 6.4.02 means ‘6 April 2002’ in Britain, but ‘June 4, 2002’ in the USA.

Names of the months are often abbreviated as follows:

Jan / Feb / Mar / Apr / May / Jun / Jul / Aug / Sep / Oct / Nov / Dec

The names of decades (e.g. the nineteen sixties) can be written like this:

the 1960s

Speaking

30 March 1993 = ‘March the thirtieth, nineteen ninety-three’ (AmE also ‘March thirtieth …’) or ‘the thirtieth of March, nineteen ninety-three’

1200 = ‘twelve hundred’

1305 = ‘thirteen hundred and five’ or ‘thirteen O (———–) five’

1498 = ‘fourteen (hundred and) ninety-eight’

1910 = ‘nineteen (hundred and) ten’

1946 = ‘nineteen (hundred and) forty-six’

2000 = ‘two thousand’

2005 = ‘two thousand and five’

2014 = ‘two thousand and fourteen’

To announce the date, It’s is used.

It’s April the first.

To ask about dates, we can say for instance:

What’s the date (today)? What date is it? What date is your birthday?

About the Author

CEO and Co-founder of Juice Academy

Mehdi Safavi is a Cambridge certified English teacher (CELTA Grade A), IDP-trained IELTS expert, Sussex Downs College TESOL with 17+ years of teaching & teacher training experience. More about him →