Dates and times

How Rime automatically expands dates and clock times into spoken form, and which formats are supported.

Rime expands dates and clock times into their spoken form automatically. Most common formats work without any preprocessing.

For a tour of text normalization across all categories, see Text normalization. For specific patterns Rime doesn’t expand cleanly, see Pre-normalizing text.

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Dates

Rime supports a variety of date formats, with year:

Format	Example	Reads as
MM/DD/YYYY	10/12/2024	october twelfth, twenty twenty-four
YYYY-MM-DD (ISO)	2021-03-15	march fifteenth, twenty twenty-one
M.D.YYYY	8.8.2018	august eighth twenty eighteen
Month name + day + year	April 2, 2024	april second, twenty twenty-four
Day + month name + year	5 July 2015	the fifth of july twenty fifteen
Year alone	1998	nineteen ninety-eight
Month + year	May 2019	may twenty nineteen
Month + ordinal day (no year)	January 1st, Jan. 1	january first

US (MM/DD/YYYY) and ISO (YYYY-MM-DD) dates read month first, as in “october twelfth…”, while a day before the month name, as in 5 July 2015, reads “the fifth of july…”. If every date should sound the same to the listener, use one format throughout.

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Times

Format	Example	Reads as
Clock + meridiem	3:45pm, 10:30 AM	three forty-five PM, ten thirty AM
24-hour	15:45	fifteen forty-five
On-the-hour	6:00	six o’clock
Dotted meridiem	6 a.m., 2 o'clock p. m.	six AM, two o’clock PM
With time zone	9:00 AM PST	nine AM PST
Word forms	noon, midnight, quarter past 6, half past 6	as written
Ranges	9:20-9:45	nine twenty to nine forty-five

Both am/pm and a.m./p.m. are accepted, with or without spaces between the time and the meridiem.

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Known gaps

A few specific date and time patterns aren’t reliably expanded. The most common are financial quarters (Q1 2025) and European 15h30 times. For the full list and a drop-in prompt template to handle them, see Pre-normalizing text.

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Related

• Numbers, currency, and measurements for years used as standalone numbers, ranges, and ordinals