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I'm working in a multilingual environment where there are various styles of date formats used concurrently (despite some efforts to standardize the formats).

In circumstances where month names are used (Jan, Feb, Mar, rather than 01, 02, 03), some legacy documents use 01/Jan/2024, not 01-Jan-2024 or 01 Jan 2024. I'm suspecting the latter two are correct because of their common appearances and the former case I've seen only in the current organization I belong. However I could not find a specific guidance(s) I could refer to. I've seen many instances where either slash or hyphen are used for number-only dates, but this case is with months as names. Could one say that the slash is used inappropriately, or at least it's discouraged for some reasons?

user3299744
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    Firstly it'll depend which country you are in because they do this differently in North America and the UK. And it varies between dates in running text and those in tables, headings, etc. And legal writing has its own rules, so if you're being very specific to that, you might do better on Law SE. But it's largely a matter of style, and being consistent and avoiding ambiguity are the most important things. Most style guides don't seem to recommend a slash, particularly in running text, and you could argue it's unnecessary, but that doesn't mean it's inappropriate. – Stuart F Jan 19 '24 at 09:49
  • I'm afraid you won't get far looking for "appropriacy" or "correctness." Perhaps frustratingly, there are many means of communicating dates, and no moral or social weight is attached to them. The only real question is whether it's effective or a good idea. (I'll say, I'd avoid it because it doesn't seem to be very common, and runs some risk of confusion.) – Andy Bonner Jan 19 '24 at 21:28
  • Which country are you in? This sort of thing varies a lot; in the US, dates are usually written "month/day/year," but the UK uses "day/month/year"; this makes a date like "5/7/23" ambiguous in a document that might be read by people in multiple different countries. – alphabet Jan 20 '24 at 16:35
  • There is an international date format standard ISO 8601. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601. More generally I've seen multiple date formats - typed I think the dash dominates but handwritten the "/" is more common I think. – Wudang Jan 25 '24 at 14:44

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