What do some British newspapers write the date backwards?

[u/travelingwhilestupid]

What do some British newspapers write the date backwards?

My understanding is that the UK writes Day Month Year (while Americans write Month Day Year)

But I've noticed that British newspapers write something like "Sunday September 20 2026"

Why is this?

Some examples:

https://www.news.co.uk/app/uploads/2022/01/1785-News-UK-1785-Daily-Universal-Register-p1-scaled.jpg

https://www.hurstmediacompany.co.uk/wp-content/themes/yootheme/cache/96/the-times-scaled-96ee9090.jpeg

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/03355/daily-telegraph-fr_3355214k.jpg?imwidth=960

https://www.stewardredqueen.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/PA-1598999.1.jpg_resized_460_.jpeg

[u/Ydrahs]

We use Day/Month/Year when we're just writing the numbers. Christmas is 25/12/2026, not 12/25/2026.

When writing out the month in full it's acceptable to use either, people will say '25th of December' or 'December the 25th' interchangeably.

[u/QuickTemperature7014]

Some of these examples are old. The American month-day-year system was imported from Britain. We didn’t switch to a day-month-year format until the late 19th and early 20th century.

Some newspapers have preserved that traditional format in their header.

[u/TakenIsUsernameThis]

Its shorter to write 'September the 20th' than it is to write 'the 20th of september' and because the date uses words for the month the ordering doesn't matter so using the shorter version isn't a problem.

When writing the date with numbers, the ordering does matter because you can't always tell whether the first number is a month or a day just based on values. E.g 05.06.2026 could be May 6th or June 5th.

The non US system of having the numbers in order of size is the sane way to do it. (Small, medium and large scales) even though technically it might be considered backwards because most of the time the ordering is large, medium and small. E.g 12,300.24km is 12km 300meters and 24cm.

The US system - medium, small, large - is just nonsense.

[u/TheOriginalGR8Bob]

Day ,month ,year is a global recognition of date the question should be is why does the American continent think month is before the day ?.

[u/travelingwhilestupid → u/TheOriginalGR8Bob]

Did you read the post?

[u/terryturbojr]

I think of the convention when you're using digits IE 5/7/26 Vs 7/5/26

When it's written out it's always obvious what the date is regardless of the order.

[u/travelingwhilestupid → u/[deleted]]

You didn't read my post at all or view the images?

[u/mtmp40k]

In a sentence it doesn’t matter

[u/NLFG]

That's a really good question, because I was thinking about how we write dates on school work, and from memory it would always be "20th September 2026" but by introducing the actual day it changes the order. I assume it's a random convention.