Date and time notation in Spain

Date

In Spain, the date order is day, month, year despite separators, Roman numerals for the month part and/or length for the year part. There is not a single fixed symbol for the separator, the most used being the stroke and the hyphen. Sometimes a dot is used, but it is rare. The hyphen tends to be clearly long when handwritten, and sometimes spaced.

Two-digit years are used for short mainly informally where no confusion arises, as in handwriting letters, notes and diaries. Official documents always use full four-digit years.

The suffixes for BCE and CE are "AC" (antes de Cristo, "before Christ") and "DC" (después de Cristo, "after Christ"), respectively. Sometimes "AD" for "Anno Domini" in Latin is used instead of "DC", but it is rare. Anyway, "DC" is omitted commonly for years past 200 CE.

Leading zeroes are rare, more frequent in the month part when used: 21/04/1980 to allow tabulation, but 02/04/1980 is more typical of automated output, as in tickets, forms, etc.

Names of months and weekdays are written in lower case, thus being common nouns rather than proper nouns, except at start of a sentence, where they are capitalized following the Spanish rules. Exceptions are some highlighted Catholic dates, as Miércoles de Ceniza ("Ash Wednesday") or Domingo de Resurrección ("Resurrection Sunday"), which are always capitalized.

In Spanish, abbreviations for the month part are usually three letters long, to avoid confusion between marzo (March) and mayo (May), and between junio (June) and julio (July).

The week runs from Monday to Sunday. In Spanish, there exists a convention for single-letter day names: L means lunes (Monday), M means martes (Tuesday), X means miércoles (Wednesday), J means jueves (Thursday), V means viernes (Friday), S means sábado (Saturday) and D means domingo (Sunday). Basically, the initial letter of the weekday name, except for Wednesday which is an "X" to avoid confusion with Tuesday. Some public vehicles, as taxicabs, wear a letter meaning the driver's weekly day-off.

Time

Official time is always given in 24-hour format. Hour-minute separator is the dot following by " h." (18.20 h.), which still is in use in some environments as press, but today the leading zeroes for the hour part are optional (more common in automated output). In speech, a time given in 24-hour format always is followed by the word horas: El concierto comenzará a las 15.30 h. ("quince y treinta" horas)/"the concert will start at 15:30".