DMY

DMY is an abbreviation commonly used to denote the day-month-year date format, in which a date is written with the day first, then the month, and finally the year. This ordering is standard in many countries, including much of Europe, parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In practice, DMY appears in two prevalent textual forms: numerical dates such as 23/06/2025 or 23.06.2025, and written forms such as 23 June 2025.

The exact delimiter varies by country and context; slashes, dots, and hyphens are all used. The same date may also be written with spaces or as a fully written form in formal documents. Variants exist even within the DMY system, depending on whether leading zeros are used (e.g., 03/07/2024) or not.

DMY contrasts with other common formats like MDY (month-day-year), used in the United States, and YMD (year-month-day), used in parts of Asia and in many technical contexts. Because numeric strings can be ambiguous (for example, 04/05/06 could be interpreted as 4 May 2006 or 5 April 2006), unambiguous representations are preferred in data exchange. ISO 8601’s YYYY-MM-DD form is commonly recommended for inter-system communication, while DMY remains widely used in everyday writing and print in many locales.

In computing, locale settings influence whether dates are displayed or parsed as DMY or another order. For data storage, many systems use unambiguous formats or timestamps to avoid confusion. The term DMY may also appear as an initialism in contexts unrelated to date formats, but in calendrical usage it refers to the day-month-year date order.