The most popular formats for expressing dates are 12th February 2006 (more formal,) 12 February, 2006 (the comma is optional) or 12-Feb-2006 (shorter, inexplicit form.)
- The most significant part of a date is the day. Hence, write the day first, followed by the month (spelled in complete or as a three-letter abbreviation) and then include the year. The least significant part of a date is the year; you may omit the year in informal communication.
- You can easily avoid confusing a reader about your intended date format by spelling out the entire month or by using a three-letter abbreviation for the month. Further, in speech or thought, we rarely express months in terms of numbers. For instance, while reading out a date, we rarely express February as the second month of the year.
P. S: International Standard ISO 8601 stipulates numeric representations for date and time. The international standard date notation is YYYY-MM-DD. Accordingly, you would denote the 12th of February 2006 as 2006-02-12. Clearly, this format does not impart order-preference to the more significant parts of the date, viz., the day and the month. However, this date format offers advantages in computer usage; I plan to cover these in a future blog article.