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I don't see where 10ya comes from, but DMY, MDY, and YMD, at least, are all plausible interpretations.

One of the comments says:

> when I searched on the problem just now, I found complaints about the same problem going back to 2006.

YMD is only plausible if the first number is 2-digits or 4-digits. How is "1" a year? Unless we're talking about 1AD...

> YMD is only plausible if the first number is 2-digits or 4-digits. How is "1" a year?

During the first decade of the 21st Century, I regularly encountered dates, especially handwritten, with single digit years, because some people first reduce to a two-digit year when writing dates, but then -- as with any other number -- leave off leading zeros.

Really? I don't think I've ever seen this, though I guess I don't deal with a lot of handwritten dates.

The date in question ("1/5/10") was formatted by a computer, so hand-written dates seem pretty far off topic.

But even ignoring that, I've never ever seen a single person write a single-digit year. Not alone ("I graduated in 1" vs "I graduated in 2001"), not in dates ("August 7, 1" vs "August 7, 2001"), not anywhere.

The single digits in the date are not prefixed with a zero. So "1" could be interpreted as 2001. Why would the first digit be prefixed with zero but not the middle digit ("5").

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