It uses the dd-mm-yyyy date format like the rest of Europe, the start of the week is on Monday (vs Sunday in the US), the default paper size is A4 (vs US letter), measurement defaults are metric (indeed UK roads use imperial, but the default is otherwise metric), the time format uses 24hrs (vs AM/PM in the US).
https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html
The fact that they are then sortable is a nice side benefit!
Anything else is as bad as using mm:hh...
Please tell me that's not a thing.
2026-07-02-16-31-52 -> -----00011222235667
Hopefully it will remain a nonsense and never be seen in the wild, unlike the phone number field which I found on a real website which responded to scroll events to increase and decrease the value it contained.
2025-06 and 2026-05 both have the same digits, for example.
In fact, the first time I signed up for my own line, it happened unintentionally, and it was only after Pacific Bell had installed the line that I figured out it spelled something, and I informed my father and it was hilarious (the spelling was "BUG-BLOW").
Reminds me of when I tell Siri, "Play 2-G-B Sydney" and she responds, "Now playing two gigabytes."
2026-07-02 16:45 becomes
2026-45-16-06-02
Bonus points for using a very confusing separator... Maybe {?
I vote for "end of unit" (ASCII 0x1F).
Do you also address your mail to "United Kingdom, Scotland, Edinburgh;" or tell people, "I'm going on holiday to Croatia, Split?"
Why isn't there an en-EU or en-ISO locale that has:
- yyyy-mm-dd
- SI units
- 1,234.56 number format> This style guide is intended primarily for English-language authors and translators, both in-house and freelance, working for the European Commission.
It specifies formats for date, numbers etc.
$ echo "$LANG"; date
en_US.UTF-8@aspirational
2026-07-02T11:17:00-07:00And having been raised in the continent, I personally find using commas for thousands disgusting.
I wish we’d rip the bandaid off and invent a new character that makes it unambiguous across the world.
For something more likely to be read by a human and not parsed by a computer (and is not locale or i18n/l10n flexible) I'll use d mmm yyyy, e.g., 3 Jul 2026. To my thinking, for English speaking this is the friendliest unambiguous format (although I'm sure opinions will differ).
If you cluster English dialects by various characteristics, you’ll end up with en-US as a clear outlier. I believe that, if you’re going to divide English into two camps, the best is “English (International)” and “English (US)”. Canadian English is the one that’s closest to US English, but even it works at least as well based on International English as regards spelling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_s... is an interesting read).
But there’s a lot more to it than spelling, and here the distinction is even clearer: the US has its own length, area, volume, weight and temperature units that no one else uses; its own stupid date format that everyone else loathes; its own paper sizes that no one else knows what to do with.
Not everyone else agrees on which date format to use, but we do all agree that any of our formats (DD/MM/YY, DD-MM-YYYY, YYYY-MM-DD, &c.) are better than the US’s middle-endian monstrosity. Though if we see the likes of DD/MM/YYYY we may mistrust whether it’s actually MM/DD/YYYY.
I also believe that you should default to English (International) for all users geolocated outside the USA.
Once you’ve get this divide right, adding further dialects also probably becomes quite a bit easier. But I do wish for diamond inheritance of locales: so you can mix in -ise/-ize, -yse/-yze, -re/-er, -ence/-ense, program/programme, and thereby deduplicate a fair bit across locales.
(There are still plenty of differences: such as time formats; decimal/grouping separators though I believe all places where English is a main language use . for decimal and , for grouping; even number grouping varies: en-IN does 1,23,45,678 rather than 12,345,678; keyboard layout; word choices; and lots more.)
(One last point: the naming is a bit fiddly. “Spanish (International)” means Spanish as used outside Spain. “English (International)” means the broad international/non-US consensus of what English is, generally following what England does but probably with kilometres instead of miles for long distances.)
I really wish en-CA was as well supported as fr-CA honestly.
You mean "English" and "English (Simplified)"?
This was a very noticeable phase in the UK; I knew several Dutch people who were fully unaware they had American accents and some American linguistic traits until they got here.
Whereas Dutch friends of my father who learned English before WWII had actually quite plummy English accents.
This is in stark constrast to Germany, say, where people colloquially use 24-hour times, with some exceptions for round times (e.g. 17:00 might be called "um fünf", but 17:05 would usually be described as "siebzehn uhr fünf", roughly translated as "seventeen oh five".
This might have changed in the last five years or so since I was living in the UK, but I've never noticed this be different when I was visiting, nor when speaking to British friends or colleagues.
But it would be beyond bizarre to write "3:59 pm"
Go on, switch your thermostat in the US to degrees C. Join us.
⸻
1. For the record:
below 0: Stay inside, drink warm cocoa
0–10: Only go out if you have to
10–20: Cold, but doable
20–30: Nice winter-sports temperature
30–40: Cold, but you could run out to the garage without a coat if you had to
40–50: Cold, but you don’t need a scarf or gloves
50–60: Cool. wear a jacket
60–70: Cool, wear a light jacket
70–80: Perfect
80–90: Warm, but not too bad. Go to the pool.
90–100: Ugh, hot. Tell your parents that you’ll pay their electric bill if necessary but they need to turn on the air conditioning.
100+: Stay inside, eat ice cream.
Everywhere sane uses a monotonic order: either increasing or decreasing units. Americans had to be different, somehow - it's a compulsion.
Americans inherited it from the British through colonialism.
Later, the British adopted the French method, as through history they periodically go through periods of Francophilia.
Look in a good British antiques store or archive and you will see letters penned by Queen Victoria using the "American" date method.
SI units everywhere
ISO date and time
American English
24 hour clock
etc
I think Windows has "English International" locale or something
Yes, but not always in my experience:
# Default locale is en_GB.utf8
> date
Fri 3 Jul 12:14:20 BST 2026
> date +%x
03/07/26
> LC_TIME="C.UTF-8" date
Fri Jul 3 12:14:29 BST 2026
> LC_TIME="C.UTF-8" date +%x
07/03/26