Style guide

Dates

Use the standard British English format when writing dates: day of the week (if including), day, month, and then year.

Don’t place commas to separate the different parts of the dates, unless you’re writing something long-form like a blog post.

Don’t use ordinal indicators, like ‘1st’ or ‘5th.’

We should always strive to spell out the date in full, and only abbreviate if there isn’t enough space to write it out. But we never abbreviate the year.

Abbreviating dates

We use the singular form of the unit, and never end the abbreviation with a full stop.

Date ranges

Always write out ‘to’ to indicate a range if there’s enough space.

If the dates are:

• within the same month, you only need to write out the month once.
• across different months, write out both months.
• across different years, write out both months and years.

We don’t typically add days of the week to date ranges, but it can assessed case by case.

If you’re tight for space, use can use an en dash – although it’s worth noting that it wouldn’t shorten the copy dramatically.

In form fields and placeholders

Only write dates using a numerical format within form field placeholders, in the dd/mm/yyyy format.

Time

Use the 12-hour clock format, including ‘am’ and ‘pm’ (lower case with no space between) to denote the time of day.

Use colons to separate the hour and minutes.

Timespans

When writing timespans, spell out ‘to’ between the times to indicate a range

If you’re really tight for space, you can use an en dash.