mjhjmtu

I am a Finnish speaker and in Finnish it is very common to speak out loud a date, say 7.9 or 13.2 or so, as (translating directly) seventh of ninth or thirteenth of second and so on. This assumes the day/month order.

I have never seen this type of reading for dates but I know I have always had troubles mentally calculating what the name of some given month is, usually having to iterate through the list of months. Is saying something like "twenty-sixth of eighth" ever fine in English?

In my experience as a native speaker of American English, the date is sometimes spoken as all numbers, particularly when reading a date written that way. However, it's in the format "two thirteen", where the first number is the month and the second number is the day. In addition, sometimes a third number (the year) is included, either by saying the entire thing ("two thousand and five") or the last two digits (e.g. "oh five"). And sometimes "dash" is said as a separator, since it's pretty common to see dates written as "9-21-18".

Due to the nature of search engines, it's a little hard to find evidence online to back this up. I was however able to find a few examples (although they are mostly written):

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  However, the audio recording of the trial reveals that McGrath actually testified that he mailed a check for $1,052 to Jones on “five-eleven,” or May 11.
  _{Edwina Jones v. Cost Management, Inc., 2014 ME 41}

  
  




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  seven eleven

  
  
  

  The one day out of the year that is completely magical. If you and your significant other share this date, you are completely in luck and will have an amazing and magical relationship.
  _{Urban Dictionary}

  
  




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  Twelve, eleven, forty-four. The expiration date of said penicillin— but that date was no longer affixed to the vials.
  _{Ruin Value: A Mystery of the Third Reich}

  
  




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  REMEMBER ME? FROM NINE DASH ELEVEN DASH TWO THOUSAND ONE?
  _{Comment on Hero fireman meets woman he saved on 9/11}

  
  

Some special dates are likely to be referred to in this fashion. The example that comes right to mind is 9/11, which is almost always referred to as "nine eleven". And then there's "eleven eleven", which the one year was "eleven eleven eleven". And, as 1006a mentions in a comment, Pi Day is called "three fourteen". Depending on who you talk to, there's also four twenty. However, the Fourth of July isn't called "seven four".

There's another similar way to describe a date using numbers, but it's only used in "poetic" contexts. The examples I know of for this are:

• "The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" is when the Armistice of Compiègne was signed.


• Various Bible translations have "the eleventh month of the twelfth year, on the first day of the month" in Ezekiel 26:1, but this is a different calendar (the New Living Translation has it as "February 3"). It's used in some other places in the Bible too.

Speakers of American English will not understand what you are saying until you explain it to them. There's nothing wrong with it grammatically or style-wise (in fact I quite like it), but this isn't a usage that exists.

I would be surprised if it existed in British English, as I would think I would have heard it by now, but you'll have to check with a Brit for that.

Much the same comments apply in UK English with one important difference: we always use the order day/month/year. This can result in very serious confusion between Americans and British. 2/12 (read as "two-twelve") would mean 2 December here but 12 February in the US. You are strongly advised to use the name of the month to avoid risk of confusion.

Note that, at least in the UK, we may write 2 December or December 2, but we always say "December the second" or "the second of December".

One important exception is 9/11 which is always called "9/11" since (1) it happened in America, and (2) the name relates to the American emergency number, 911.