5 exercises on saying dates, times and money aloud — ISO 8601, 24-hour clock, UTC, cron syntax, SaaS revenue, and ISO durations.
Key patterns
2026-06-16 — ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD), read naturally
14:30 UTC — "fourteen thirty you-tee-see" (24-hour, colon silent)
0 9 * * 1-5 — cron: "at 9am, Monday to Friday"
$1.5M ARR — "one point five million dollars, A-R-R"
PT5M — ISO duration: five minutes (M after T = minutes)
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
A log entry is timestamped 2026-06-16 (ISO 8601). How is this date read aloud?
2026-06-16 = "the sixteenth of June, twenty twenty-six":
ISO 8601 always orders date parts largest to smallest: YYYY-MM-DD. When read aloud you convert it to natural spoken English rather than reading the dashes.
British: "the sixteenth of June, twenty twenty-six".
American: "June sixteenth, twenty twenty-six".
Why ISO 8601 matters: it is unambiguous and sorts correctly as text, which is why logs, APIs and filenames use it. The format avoids the UK/US clash where 06/16 vs 16/06 confuses readers.
Reading the literal form ("two-oh-two-six dash...") is only done when dictating an exact string, e.g. into a config file. In conversation you say the date naturally. The month is 06 = June; you never read it "right to left" or as a fraction ("six over sixteen").
2 / 5
A meeting is set for 14:30 UTC. How is this time read aloud?
14:30 UTC = "fourteen thirty U-T-C" (2:30 pm UTC):
This is 24-hour time. The hours and minutes are read together; the colon is not spoken.
"fourteen thirty" — the standard 24-hour reading.
"half past two (in the afternoon)" — the equivalent 12-hour form (14:30 = 2:30 pm).
UTC is read letter by letter: "you-tee-see" (Coordinated Universal Time). It is the timezone reference for distributed teams.
09:00 → "oh nine hundred" / "nine a.m."
00:00 → "midnight" / "zero hundred hours"
23:45 → "twenty-three forty-five" / "quarter to midnight"
Wrong: 14:30 is afternoon, not "a.m."; the colon is silent (not "colon thirty"); and there is no decimal point ("fourteen point thirty" is wrong — minutes are not decimals of an hour).
3 / 5
A cron schedule is written 0 9 * * 1-5. How would you describe it aloud?
0 9 * * 1-5 = "at 09:00, Monday to Friday":
A cron expression has five fields: minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week. Read this one field by field:
0 minute = on the zeroth minute (top of the hour)
9 hour = at 9 (09:00)
* day-of-month = every day
* month = every month
1-5 day-of-week = Monday (1) through Friday (5)
So it runs "at nine a.m. every weekday". Spoken, the * is read as "star" or "every", and 1-5 as "one to five" or "Monday to Friday".
SaaS metrics spoken: ARR = annual recurring revenue; MRR = monthly recurring revenue ("em-arr-arr"). Note "M" can mean million (in $1.5M) but the M in MRR means monthly — context decides. Distractors mis-expand the suffix or the acronym.
5 / 5
An API returns a duration field as PT5M (ISO 8601 duration). What does it mean and how is it read?
PT5M = a duration of five minutes:
This is an ISO 8601 duration, not a clock time. It starts with P (period); the T separates date parts from time parts. After T, M means minutes.
PT5M → read as "a five-minute duration" or "period, time, five minutes".
P3D → three days; PT2H30M → two hours thirty minutes; P1Y → one year.
The crucial M ambiguity: in ISO 8601 durations, M means months in the date part (before T) but minutes in the time part (after T). Because PT5M has the 5M after the T, it is five minutes — not five months.
How to say it: almost always translate to plain English ("five minutes"), only spelling out "P-T-five-M" when dictating the literal token. It has nothing to do with Pacific Time, and it is not "point five" (there is no decimal).