Roman Numeral Date Converter

Most people converting a date to Roman numerals are not doing arithmetic — they are marking something. A birth date for a tattoo, a wedding date for a ring, an anniversary for a necklace or a plaque. That is why this tool takes the date however you naturally write it, including a month by name, and then lets you choose exactly how the result is laid out, because that layout is what ends up permanently on the object.

Enter the date on the left, pick the order and separator above, and copy the result. Use the swap button to go the other way and read an existing set of numerals back into a normal date.

Should the month or the day come first?

This is the decision worth getting right before anything is engraved, and there is no universal answer — it depends on who will read it. Month-first (VI • XV • MMXXV) follows the US convention. Day-first (XV • VI • MMXXV) follows the European one, and is also the more common choice in tattoo work generally.

The practical risk is real but narrow: it only creates genuine ambiguity when both the day and the month are twelve or under. June 15th is unmistakable in either order, because there is no fifteenth month. May 6th is not — V • VI and VI • V are both readable as May 6th or June 5th depending on the convention the reader assumes. If your date falls in that overlap and it matters, day-first is the safer default, and spelling the month out in words is safer still.

Which separator should I use?

The interpunct (•) is the most common choice for engraved and tattooed dates — it reads as a deliberate divider rather than punctuation, and it does not collide visually with the numerals themselves. Periods are the next most common. Hyphens and slashes are used, but a slash in particular can be hard to distinguish from the letter I in some serif faces at small sizes, which is worth raising with whoever is doing the work.

All four are available above, and the spacing changes with the choice: the interpunct is rendered with spaces around it, the tighter marks without.

How does the conversion work?

Each part of the date — day, month and year — is converted independently, then joined with your chosen separator. Within each number, the value is built from the largest symbols first. Most of the time that is straightforward addition: 8 is VIII (5+1+1+1). For 4 and 9 in each place value, Roman numerals use subtraction instead of four repeated symbols, so 4 is IV rather than IIII, and 9 is IX. Months are the simplest part, since they only ever run from I to XII.

What are recent years in Roman numerals?

The year is usually the longest and most error-prone part of the date, so here it is worked out for the years most often requested:

Is there a limit to how large a number this handles?

No hard cap. Beyond 3999 there is no standard single symbol, so the converter simply repeats M for each additional thousand — 4000 becomes MMMM. That is outside conventional notation, which is why most reference tables stop at 3999, but it keeps the behavior predictable rather than failing. Zero has no Roman symbol at all and converts to nothing, so a year entered as 00 produces an empty year segment.

Does it check that the date is real?

No, and that is deliberate. A day of 32 or a month of 13 converts as written rather than being rejected, because the tool is also useful for converting arbitrary numbers that happen to be laid out like a date. If you need the date validated, check it before converting — nothing here will catch February 30th for you.

See it in use

If you're planning a tattoo or engraving, the use-case guide covers the decisions that matter beyond the conversion itself.

Related tools

• Number to Words Converter — write a number out in full English words.
• Random Date Generator — generate a random date in a range.
• A1Z26 Cipher — another letter-and-number encoding, where A=1 and Z=26.
• APA Citation Generator — format a dated source in APA 7th edition.
• Big Text Generator — render the finished numerals large for a mockup.

Last reviewed: August 2026