British English rules for writing dates

okay. i have a question. i was told that writing 4th January 2008 is wrong. that people only say 'the 4th of January' and write 1 January 2008. is the version with with 'th' 'rd' and 'st' (as in fourth, third, first) more used by older people and being phased out?

i'm not from the UK. it's an ongoing conversation i've been having with a client.

I don't know who told you that, but '4th January, 2008' is quite usual in the UK (note the pedantic comma before the year).
Or maybe my correspondents and I are being phased out?

4th January, 2008 is just fine, just out of interest what do you consider "older people" ?

my profession is not that of a teacher. but i taught an english class at a fairly large institution here a couple of years ago and they handed me a british text. it said you say 'the fourth of june' but you write 4 june.

also read here:

' In English there are various ways of writing the date. The preferred mode in business correspondence is 30 November 2001.'
BBC

i was thinking it's perhaps like during my university days we initially were taught to put 2 spaces after a period when writing papers. and then it became 1 space.

age-wise, sorry to say, i mean under 30. and i don't believe 31 or even 40 is old, although technically 35 is middle-age. and i did write 'older' not 'old' in my first post.

I too would have said that 5th May was just tickety-boo.
However age-wise (so to speak) I am no longer under 30.
Also however, I have just checked the most recent official correspondence I received from the UK. And all the letters (from financial institutions etc.) use the format 7 April, i.e. without the -th.
So there you go.

I guess it's just a matter of personal style, certainly no-one will jump down your throat if you use one other another. From a computing point of view, it's certainly easier not to mess around with the code which decides the ending, which is perhaps why it is widely missed out in (automatically generated) business correpondence.
The only criteria is that:

Actually if you say the 4th, then don't write 1

18th June, 2008. Anything else shows a lack of education. The BBC site quoted just shows how much that institution wants to dumb us down and simplify their job.

I write it with the st/nd/rd/th if written by hand, or manually typed, but if I'm doing a template letter, then I'm too lazy to alter the default 1 January 2008 etc. I should think it quite likely that that is how the format has come in.

So Bill Gates and his Microsoft legions take over the world.

I don't think it's peculiar to Microsoft. I don't recall seeing the proper format implemented in any date field, although it would surely be quite easy.

business writing sometimes evolves without any big production and then you get a letter from a bank (like someone mentioned) and you see that something new has arisen. there are also old german (business english) textbooks which say americans should use 'dear ladies and gentlemen' or something like that, for a salutation if you don't know the person's name. and this is straight out of the 50s, i think.

Sorry, completely wrong. One no longer writes "th" in the date in any professional text. It's got nothing to do with dumbing down or with Americanisation. See the front page of The Times – hardly a bastion of Americanism.

Well, the correct answer is "it depends".

Many companies have their own standard forms and ways of writing things. So when writing business letters and you are employed by a company, it is best to follow their standard even if you don't think it is "proper English".

Most often used for formal business letters, academic papers, government papers:
12 October 2008 (see University of Oxford writing and style guide)
12 October, 2008

Most often used for informal letters, diary entries:
12th October 2008
12th October, 2008
12th of October, 2008

Rarely used today:
Twelfth of October, 2008

What ESL students are being taught, however, is sometimes a little different. Here are a few online guides that I've found. I don't necessarily agree with them, but it might explain why some Germans may be quite adamant in what they believe is the "correct" way to write a date.

http://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/time-date.htm
http://www.ego4u.com/en/cram-up/vocabulary/date/written
http://www.perfectyourenglish.com/writing/dates.htm

could you send a direct link to the article? this would be helpful. thx.

What article?

the article on The Times website. the above link only leads to the home page.

oh i see, you only wanted us to look at the date at the top of the site. sorry 4 the misunderstanding.