Expressing Dates

Writing a date in Spanish looks almost the same as in English until you notice three key differences: the order of the parts, the lack of capital letters, and the special treatment of the first of the month.

Standard order: day, month, year

Spanish dates always go from smallest to largest: day → month → year. The pieces are joined with de.

Months are lowercase

This trips up English speakers constantly. In Spanish, month names are always written with a lowercase letter, even at the start of a date string mid-sentence.

The first of the month

This is the one place where Spanish uses an ordinal in a date. In Latin America, the 1st of the month is usually called el primero.

The cardinal form el uno de enero or el 1 de enero is also used and perfectly understood — it's especially common in writing — but spoken Spanish throughout Latin America strongly prefers el primero.

Asking the date

The most common questions for asking the date are straightforward. All of these are natural in Latin America:

• ¿Qué fecha es hoy? — What's today's date?
• ¿A qué estamos hoy? — What day are we on?
• ¿Cuál es la fecha de hoy? — What is today's date?

To answer, use Hoy es... followed by the date.

Writing dates in short form

When you need to write a date numerically, the Latin American convention is day/month/year, with slashes, dashes, or periods between.

The year

Years in Spanish are read as ordinary cardinal numbers, without the English habit of splitting them into two-digit halves. 1985 is mil novecientos ochenta y cinco ("one thousand nine hundred eighty-five"), not "nineteen eighty-five."

For help with reading the larger numbers involved, see Cardinal Numbers 100 and Beyond.

Days of the week

The days of the week are also lowercase, and they take the article el for singular ("on Monday") or los for recurring ("on Mondays").

Notice that Spanish does not use the preposition en before the day — the article el does the work instead.

For more on the article pattern with days and dates, see articles with days and dates. To review the cardinal numbers you'll use for days of the month, head back to Cardinal Numbers 0–30.