mmddyyyy

MMDDYYYY is a date notation that encodes the month, day, and year in fixed positions: two digits for the month, two digits for the day, and four digits for the year. It is commonly written with separators as MM/DD/YYYY or MM-DD-YYYY, but a compact eight-digit form without separators—MMDDYYYY—is also used in certain data contexts and software fields.

The format is widely used in the United States for forms, records, and user interfaces, reflecting historical conventions in American practice. International contexts often prefer ISO 8601’s YYYY-MM-DD or other locale-specific orders, so MMDDYYYY can lead to misinterpretation outside its primary region. Many systems support multiple date formats and may display or store dates internally in a standardized form while presenting MMDDYYYY to users.

Ambiguity is a notable consideration when dates are presented without explicit month names. For example, 04/07/2023 could be interpreted as April 7, 2023 in the United States or July 4, 2023 in locales that place the day before the month. To reduce confusion, documents sometimes use the month name (April 7, 2023) or adopt a unambiguous format such as ISO 8601.

When used as an eight-digit numeric string (MMDDYYYY), the format benefits from fixed length and straightforward numeric sorting, but it can complicate date arithmetic and parsing in software unless proper parsing rules are applied. Validation typically enforces leading zeros for single-digit months and days.

See also: date formats, ISO 8601, cross-cultural date representation.