Dates and Years

Dates and years sit at the intersection of numbers and culture. Get them right and you can fill in a form, accept an invitation, or wish someone a happy syttende mai without hesitation. Norwegian dates differ from American ones in three structural ways — day comes before month, months are lowercase, and the figure format is DD.MM.YYYY — and years follow a reading convention that splits at the year 2000. This page walks through all of it, with the single most culturally loaded date in Norway, the 17th of May, as a running example.

The order: day before month

Norwegian puts the day first, then the month, with no preposition like English "of." The day is an ordinal (see the ordinals page), so it carries a period in figures.

• 17. mai
  = read syttende mai = "the 17th of May"
• 1. januar
  = første januar = "the 1st of January"
• 24. desember
  = tjuefjerde desember = "the 24th of December"

In spoken or fully written-out form you may add the article den: den syttende mai, den første januar. Both "17. mai" and "den 17. mai" are correct; den is slightly more formal or emphatic, the bare form is the everyday default.

Months are lowercase

Every month name is lowercase in Norwegian, even mid-sentence — a sharp break from English, which capitalises them. This is the same rule that keeps weekdays, languages, and nationalities lowercase in Norwegian.

Watch two spellings: mars (March) ends in -s, and desember is written with s, not the English c. The weekdays are likewise lowercase: mandag, tirsdag, onsdag, torsdag, fredag, lørdag, søndag — note lørdag and søndag with ø.

The figure format: DD.MM.YYYY

In digits, Norway writes dates as day.month.year, separated by periods: 17.05.2024 = the 17th of May 2024. This is the opposite component order from American 05/17/2024, and the periods (not slashes) are the standard separator. For the year alone, all four digits are written: 2024, not "'24" in formal contexts.

Reading years: the split at 2000

This is the convention worth memorising. Years in the 1900s (and earlier centuries) are read as two two-digit halves — the century, then the rest — exactly like English "nineteen forty-five." Years from 2000 on are usually read as "two thousand and …".

The longer 1900s form nittenhundreogførtifem ("nineteen-hundred-and-forty-five") also exists and is fully correct, but the clipped nitten førtifem is what people actually say. For the 2000s, a newer clipped style is gaining ground in casual speech — tjuetjuefire for 2024, treating it like a 19xx year (twenty twenty-four) — but to tusen og tjuefire remains the safe, widely-understood default.

Centuries and decades

To name a century, Norwegian counts the hundreds digit and adds -tallet ("the …-hundreds"). So på 1800-tallet literally means "in the 1800s" and corresponds to English "in the 19th century" — note the off-by-one: the 1800s are the nineteenth century. Decades work the same way: på 90-tallet = "in the nineties."

Saying what today's date is

To ask and answer the date, Norwegian uses det with an ordinal:

• Hvilken dato er det i dag? — What's the date today?
• I dag er det tredje juni. — Today is the 3rd of June.

You will also hear the more colloquial Hvor mange er det i dag? (literally "how many is it today?"), answered with den tredje ("the third"). Both patterns are everyday-natural.

The 17th of May

No date carries more weight in Norway than syttende mai — grunnlovsdagen, Constitution Day, marking the signing of the 1814 constitution. It is celebrated with children's parades (barnetog), national dress (bunad), and the cry gratulerer med dagen! ("congratulations on the day"). If you learn one Norwegian date by heart, make it this one — and note that even here the month stays lowercase: syttende mai, never "Mai."

Common Mistakes

Capitalising the month. English habit dies hard, but Norwegian months are always lowercase.

Using a cardinal for the day. The day is an ordinal; "May 3rd" is tredje mai, not "tre mai."

Reading the figure date in American order. 04.03.2023 is day.month: the 4th of March, not the 3rd of April.

Mixing up the century offset. The 1800s are the 19th century, said 1800-tallet.

Key Takeaways

• Order is day before month, no "of":
  17. mai
  , den første januar.
• Months and weekdays are lowercase, always — even mid-sentence.
• Figure format is DD.MM.YYYY with periods: 17.05.2024.
• Read pre-2000 years as two halves (nitten førtifem, 1945); read post-2000 years as to tusen og … (2024).
• Centuries use -tallet on the hundreds digit: 1800-tallet = the 1800s = the 19th century.
• The one date to know by heart: syttende mai, Norway's Constitution Day.