Year Line

Since wedding invitations are sent four to six weeks before the wedding, it is not necessary to include the year. Your guests will assume that the invitation is for the next August twenty-third and not for some other August twenty-third in the distant future.

Although it is not necessary to include the year, it is not improper to do so. Your invitations will, undoubtedly, be saved by family and friends as a remembrance and may even be passed down to your children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Including the year on your invitation will help your descendants remember your wedding day.

There are a couple of cautions, though, about including the year. First, many lettering styles, especially some of the script lettering styles, look better with fewer lines of copy. Additional lines might make your invitation look too cluttered.

Second, the year line is a long, heavy line that follows two other heavy lines (the groom's name and the date). This creates a lot of weight in that part of the invitation, which can draw your eye there instead of to the names of the bride and groom, where it should be drawn.

Wedding announcements, on the other hand, are sent after the wedding has taken place. Therefore, it is necessary to include the year or it could be assumed that your wedding took place on any August twenty-third in the past.

Should the T in "two thousand" be upper- or lowercase?

Although both ways are proper and many older invitations use all lowercase letters on the year line, almost all invitations nowadays capitalize the first letter. This usage is so common that not to do it might make it look as though your stationer forgot to capitalize the first letter. Furthermore, your invitations will look more polished if the first letter of the year is capitalized.

Isn't it incorrect to use "and" as in "Two thousand and one"?

In mathematics "and" denotes a decimal point, and since there is no decimal point in the year "2001," it may seem incorrect to use "and." Wedding invitations, however, are not mathematical equations so the use of "and" as a decimal point is irrelevant. On wedding invitations "and" is used simply as a connective word.