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According to Location of day of week in non-U.S. long format dates?, days of the week should be placed before the rest of the date and separated by a comma:

Wednesday, 26 September 1832

How does one abbreviate the day of the week and month? Are there periods or no periods?

Wed, 26 Sep 1832

or

Wed., 26 Sep. 1832

What should you do if the year is omitted?

Wed, 26 Sep

or

Wed., 26 Sep.

And what if there is a range of dates that needs to specify both the day of the week and the month?

Wed, 26 Sep, to Tue, 2 Oct

or

Wed., 26 Sep., to Tue., 2 Oct.

I'm from the U.S. and can find plenty of date-related information in Chicago Manual of Style et al, but the Oxford Style Guide doesn't fully answer the question. Oxford does say to avoid mentioning days of the week at all, but in this case, I am required to specify them.

Community
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Nicole L
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    There is no ultimate style guide here at all. You have to be coherent and not change horses in mid-stream. In any case, I would not use a period: Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat, Sun. There are too many questions in your question. Advice: keep it simple. Wed, 26 Sept to Tue, 2 Oct. For the months, use four letters for Sept but three for Oct, Nov and Dec and the others. – Lambie Jan 11 '17 at 21:59
  • @Lambie So, are you saying that September should be abbreviated to four letters, but June and July should be abbreviated to three letters? – Scott - Слава Україні Jan 12 '17 at 19:08
  • Yes, I am. The fact is there is no ultimate style guide for this. The point is to make one's own, keep it simple and definitely not use periods. Only commas. Personally, for Set I would use: Sept. But that's just me. – Lambie Jan 12 '17 at 19:22
  • If you have the luxury of picking a format then please choose one of the ISO standards. Dates and times are covertly complicated and error prone and one day a poor IT monkey like me will have to plus those dates into something. – BanksySan Jan 12 '17 at 19:31
  • BanksySan, I don't have the ability to choose, but we are using the little endian form (day month year), which I believe follows ISO guidelines. – Nicole L Jan 20 '17 at 20:03
  • @Lambie, are you speaking from experience or offering your opinion? I think your advice is good, but I want to make sure it is from someone familiar with British/European conventions. – Nicole L Jan 20 '17 at 20:04
  • @Nicole L All I can do is share what I know. That is based on professional experience as an editor and writer in international orgs. and actually in a Briitsh org. The only English convention relevant here is that the British write: 8 January 2015 whilst (ha ha) Americans write January 8, 2015. – Lambie Jan 20 '17 at 20:19

1 Answers1

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This might be what you're looking for. I work in IT and have to deal with the hell of differing date formats quite regularly.

The solution for us is the ISO 8601 standard.

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I'm not aware of any format format that is just day and month though.

BanksySan
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  • That does not work. She needs it written out. She made that very clear. – Lambie Jan 12 '17 at 19:23
  • @Lambie I can't see anywhere that she states "I need you to write it out". I'm not sure how a reference to internal date time standards would prevent that anyhow. – BanksySan Jan 12 '17 at 19:27
  • Long-format dates. – Lambie Jan 12 '17 at 19:52
  • ISo standards includes long date formats. – BanksySan Jan 13 '17 at 11:07
  • But that is not what you posted. You didn't answer the question at all. 2013-02-27 is not the format the OP asked about. Come now. – Lambie Jan 13 '17 at 14:44
  • @BanksySan, Lambie is correct. I need answers for the examples I wrote in the question, not for numeric dates, and specifically for days of the week. I had checked ISO standards before writing the question. – Nicole L Jan 20 '17 at 20:06