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While I am a strong supporter of ISO8601 (e.g. 2023-07-12) there is an argument that decreasing specificity is preferable (as in ISO8601) and that for most day-to-day usage the year is somewhat implicit, hence being at the end.

Personally, I write the month out if I'm not using 8601 formatting to avoid any ambiguity.

For any sort of recordkeeping, though, I think it's preferable to go full on YYYY-MM-DD. It's more thorough, precise, and sorts properly on a computer.

Outside the US, how is a month+day combination written out/spoken?

"May 3" / "May 3rd" or "3 May" ?

3 May in Italy. It’s always day first. You never hear anyone saying or writing the month first.

In most contexts I would never use the cardinal number "3", it'd always be "the 3rd of May" or "May (the) 3rd", but in a country like Australia (with a high number of speakers from different cultural backgrounds) you hear all sorts of conventions used in casual conversation.

“3rd of may”

I don't think "it makes more sense" is exactly describing the reasoning.

Neither do I, but the rest of what I wrote does.