The Twenty-Second of February, Twenty Twenty-two.

22/02/2022 – remove the slashes, and today’s date (in DD/MM/YYYY) is a palindrome. This happens fairly frequently in the time we’re living in, and with 20XX, we’ve especially had a glut of them in Februaries for the last 22 years… though this is the last eight-digit February palindrome we’ll be seeing!

Today is also a ubiquitous palindrome day: it’s a palindrome in the US format too, at least, in the short format: 2/22/22 in M/DD/YY is a five digit palindrome. It’s reasonably rare to have a palindrome day in both formats, and today’s earned the nickname “Twosday”, falling as it does, on the second day of the week.

Personally, I’d call this a semi-ubiquitous ^{(I ain’t no ox moron)} palindrome day… not to be a spoilsport, but as a programmer, ISO8601 is where it’s at. Let’s not leave out YYYY-MM-DD.

Sure, if you shorten it to YY-M-DD then 22-2-22 is a palindrome too, and slightly more pleasing to write than in the US format… but that’s how we get date overflow issues, so let’s… not.

The next fully-ubiquitous (forgive my tautology…) 8-digit palindrome day is not so far away, considering the last one was over 900 years ago, on 1111-11-11. However, I’m still sure I won’t be around to celebrate it with the middle chocolate of my Advent calendar, on the Twelfth of December, Twenty-one Twenty-one.