Ordinal indicator
Encyclopedia
In written languages, an ordinal indicator is a sign adjacent to a numeral denoting that it is an ordinal number
Ordinal number (linguistics)
In linguistics, ordinal numbers are the words representing the rank of a number with respect to some order, in particular order or position . Its use may refer to size, importance, chronology, etc...

, rather than a cardinal number. The exact sign used varies in different languages.

English

The suffixes -st (e.g. 21st), -nd (e.g. 22nd), -rd (e.g. 23rd), and -th (e.g. 24th) are used. In the Victorian period, these indicators were superscripts (2nd, 34th) under general French influence especially in British English. During most of the 20th century, formatting them on the baseline was favored. For example, the 16th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style
The Chicago Manual of Style
The Chicago Manual of Style is a style guide for American English published since 1906 by the University of Chicago Press. Its 16 editions have prescribed writing and citation styles widely used in publishing...

 states: "The letters in ordinal numbers should not appear as superscripts (e.g., 122nd not 122nd)." The usual explanation for this rule is that superscript suffixes in small type are hard to read and spoil the appearance of the page. Since the 1990s, the superscript style has come to dominate casual writing, because some word processor
Word processor
A word processor is a computer application used for the production of any sort of printable material....

s format ordinal indicators as superscripts by default.

-st is used with numbers ending in 1 (spoken or written fully as -first), -nd is used with numbers ending in 2 (spoken or written fully as -second), -rd is used with numbers ending in 3 (spoken or written fully as -third), and -th is used for all other numbers' ordinals. There is an important exception: the "teens" ending with -11 through -19 use the -th ordinal (spoken or written out fully with a -th suffix): 11th for eleventh, 114th for one-hundred fourteenth, etc.

French

The suffixes
-er (e.g. ), -re (e.g. ), and -e (e.g. ). These indicators use superscript formatting whenever it is available. Alternatively, the suffix -ème is used in place of -e (e.g. ).

The suffix
º is used for terms like , , and as , , and .

Dutch

Unlike other Germanic languages, Dutch is similar to English in this respect: the French layout with
-e used to be popular, but the recent spelling changes
Dutch orthography
Dutch orthography uses the Latin alphabet according to a system which has evolved to suit the needs of the Dutch language. The regular relationship of graphemes to phonemes is listed in the article on Dutch language...

 now prescribe the suffix
-e. Optionally -ste and -de may be used, but this is more complex and nowadays less used: 1ste (eerste), 2de (tweede), 4de (vierde), 20ste (twintigste), etc.
Croatian
Croatian language
Croatian is the collective name for the standard language and dialects spoken by Croats, principally in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Serbian province of Vojvodina and other neighbouring countries...

, Czech
Czech language
Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czechs worldwide. The language was known as Bohemian in English until the late 19th century...

, Danish
Danish language
Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...

, Estonian
Estonian language
Estonian is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and tens of thousands in various émigré communities...

, Faroese
Faroese language
Faroese , is an Insular Nordic language spoken by 48,000 people in the Faroe Islands and about 25,000 Faroese people in Denmark and elsewhere...

, German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

, Hungarian
Hungarian language
Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....

, Icelandic
Icelandic language
Icelandic is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese.Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages. Historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the...

, Latvian
Latvian language
Latvian is the official state language of Latvia. It is also sometimes referred to as Lettish. There are about 1.4 million native Latvian speakers in Latvia and about 150,000 abroad. The Latvian language has a relatively large number of non-native speakers, atypical for a small language...

, Norwegian
Norwegian language
Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...

, Polish
Polish language
Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...

, Slovak
Slovak language
Slovak , is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Slavic languages .Slovak is the official language of Slovakia, where it is spoken by 5 million people...

, Slovene, Serbian
Serbian language
Serbian is a form of Serbo-Croatian, a South Slavic language, spoken by Serbs in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and neighbouring countries....

, Turkish
Turkish language
Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...

 
A period or full stop
Full stop
A full stop is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of sentences. In American English, the term used for this punctuation is period. In the 21st century, it is often also called a dot by young people...

 is written after the numeral. The same usage, apparently borrowed from German, is now a standard in Polish
Polish language
Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...

, where it replaced the superscript of the last phoneme (following complex declension and gender patterns, e.g., , , , ; use of such contractions is considered an error; probably it's a calque
Calque
In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation.-Calque:...

 from Russian, see below).

Galician
Galician language
Galician is a language of the Western Ibero-Romance branch, spoken in Galicia, an autonomous community located in northwestern Spain, where it is co-official with Castilian Spanish, as well as in border zones of the neighbouring territories of Asturias and Castile and León.Modern Galician and...

, Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

, Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...

, and Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

 

The suffixes -o and -a are appended to the numeral depending on whether the number's grammatical gender
Grammatical gender
Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...

 is masculine or feminine respectively. As with French, these signs are preferably superscripted, but in contrast, they are often underline
Underline
An underline, also called an underscore, is one or more horizontal lines immediately below a portion of writing. Single, and occasionally double , underlining was originally used in hand-written or typewritten documents to emphasise text...

d as well. Some character sets provide characters specifically for use as ordinal indicators in these languages: º and ª (in Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

 U+00BA and U+00AA). The masculine ordinal indicator U+00BA (º) is often confused with the degree sign U+00B0 (°), which looks very similar in many fonts and is available on Italian and Spanish keyboard layout. The degree sign is a uniform circle and is never underlined, while the letter o may be oval
Oval
An oval is any curve resembling an egg or an ellipse, such as a Cassini oval. The term does not have a precise mathematical definition except in one area oval , but it may also refer to:* A sporting arena of oval shape** a cricket field...

 or elliptical and have a varying stroke width. The letter
o may also be underlined.

In Spanish, using the two final letters of the word as it is spelt is not allowed, except in the cases of (an apocope
Apocope
In phonology, apocope is the loss of one or more sounds from the end of a word, and especially the loss of an unstressed vowel.-Historical sound change:...

 of ) before singular masculine nouns, which is not abbreviated as but as . And the same happens with (an apocope of ) before singular masculine nouns, which is not abbreviated as but as . With compound ordinals ending in "primer" or "tercer", the same applies. For instance, "twenty-first" is before a masculine noun, and its abbreviation is . Since none of these words should be shortened before feminine nouns, their correct forms for those cases are and . These can be represented as and .

Irish

The suffix
ú is appended to all numerals, 1ú, 2ú, 3ú, 4ú etc., even though the written form does not simply attach the suffix to all numbers, i.e.
  • a haon - chéad (an t-aonú) - 1ú
  • a dó - dara - 2ú
  • a trí - tríú - 3ú
  • a ceathair - ceathrú - 4ú
  • a cúig - cúigiú - 5ú

Catalan

The rule is to follow the number with the last letter in the singular and the last two letters in the plural. Most numbers follow the pattern exemplified by "20" (
m sg, f sg, m pl, f pl), but the first few ordinals are irregular, affecting the abbreviations of the masculine forms. Superscripting is nonstandard.

Russian

One or two letters of the spelled-out numeral are appended to it (either after a hyphen or, rarely, in superscript). The rule is to take the minimal number of letters that include at least one consonant phoneme. Examples: 2-му второму /ftɐromu/, 2-я вторая /ftɐraja/, 2-й второй /ftɐroj/ (note that in the second example the vowel letter я represents two phonemes, one of which (/j/) is consonant).

Finnish

When the numeral is followed by its head
Head (linguistics)
In linguistics, the head is the word that determines the syntactic type of the phrase of which it is a member, or analogously the stem that determines the semantic category of a compound of which it is a component. The other elements modify the head....

 noun (which indicates the grammatical case
Grammatical case
In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is an inflectional form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, a pronoun may play the role of subject , of direct object , or of possessor...

 of the ordinal), it is sufficient to write a period or full stop
Full stop
A full stop is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of sentences. In American English, the term used for this punctuation is period. In the 21st century, it is often also called a dot by young people...

 after the numeral:
Päädyin kilpailussa
2. sijalle 'In the competition, I finished in 2nd place'. However, if the head noun is omitted, the ordinal indicator takes the form of a morphological
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...

 suffix, which is attached to the numeral with a colon
Colon (punctuation)
The colon is a punctuation mark consisting of two equally sized dots centered on the same vertical line.-Usage:A colon informs the reader that what follows the mark proves, explains, or lists elements of what preceded the mark....

. In the nominative case
Nominative case
The nominative case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments...

, the suffix is ‑nen for 1 and 2, and ‑s for larger numerals: Minä olin 2:nen, ja veljeni oli 3:s 'I came 2nd, and my brother came 3rd'.

The system becomes rather complicated when the ordinal needs to be inflected, as the ordinal suffix is adjusted according to the case ending:
3:s
(nominative case, which has no ending), 3:nnen (genitive case
Genitive case
In grammar, genitive is the grammatical case that marks a noun as modifying another noun...

 with ending ‑n), 3:tta (partitive case
Partitive case
The partitive case is a grammatical case which denotes "partialness", "without result", or "without specific identity". It is also used in contexts where a subgroup is selected from a larger group, or with numbers....

 with ending ‑ta), 3:nnessa (inessive case
Inessive case
Inessive case is a locative grammatical case. This case carries the basic meaning of "in": for example, "in the house" is "talo·ssa" in Finnish, "maja·s" in Estonian, "etxea·n" in Basque, "nam·e" in Lithuanian and "ház·ban" in Hungarian.In Finnish the inessive case is typically formed by adding...

 with ending ‑ssa), 3:nteen (illative case
Illative case
Illative is, in the Finnish language, Estonian language and the Hungarian language, the third of the locative cases with the basic meaning of "into ". An example from Hungarian is "a házba"...

 with ending ‑en), etc. Even native speakers sometimes find it difficult to exactly identify the ordinal suffix, as its borders with the word stem
Word stem
In linguistics, a stem is a part of a word. The term is used with slightly different meanings.In one usage, a stem is a form to which affixes can be attached. Thus, in this usage, the English word friendships contains the stem friend, to which the derivational suffix -ship is attached to form a new...

 and the case ending may appear blurred. In such cases it may be preferable to write the ordinal as a word (i.e., entirely with letters
Letter (alphabet)
A letter is a grapheme in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters compose phonemes and each phoneme represents a phone in the spoken form of the language....

) instead – and particularly 2:nen is rare even in the nominative case, as it is not significantly shorter than if written as a word (toinen).

Swedish

The general rule is that :a (for 1 and 2) or :e (for all other numbers, except 101:a, 42:a, et cetera) is appended to the numeral. When indicating dates, suffixes are never used. Examples: "1:a klass" (first (i.e. business) class), "3:e utgåvan" (third edition), but "6 november". Furthermore, suffixes can be left out if the number obviously is an ordinal number, example: "3 utg." (3rd ed). Using a full stop
Full stop
A full stop is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of sentences. In American English, the term used for this punctuation is period. In the 21st century, it is often also called a dot by young people...

 as an ordinal indicator is considered archaic
Archaism
In language, an archaism is the use of a form of speech or writing that is no longer current. This can either be done deliberately or as part of a specific jargon or formula...

, but still occurs in military contexts. Example: "5. komp" (5th company).

Similar conventions

Some languages use superior letter
Superior letter
In typography and handwriting, a superior letter is a lower-case letter placed above the baseline and made smaller than ordinary script. The style is distinct from superscript. Formerly quite common in abbreviations, the original purpose was to make handwritten abbreviations clearly distinct from...

s as a typographic convention for abbreviations that aren't related to ordinal numbers – the letters o and a may be among those used, but they don't indicate ordinals:
Spanish uses the indicator letters in some abbreviations, such as for ("approved"); and for , a Spanish name frequently used in compounds like .
In Portuguese, the underlined "º" and "ª" are used with many abbreviations, and should be preceded by a period. In fact, there is no limit for which words may be abbreviated this way. Sometimes, other letters are also written before the "º" or "ª". For example: for (an honorific
Honorific
An honorific is a word or expression with connotations conveying esteem or respect when used in addressing or referring to a person. Sometimes, the term is used not quite correctly to refer to an honorary title...

), for (Ltd.), for (Ms.
Ms.
Ms. or Ms is an English honorific used with the last name or full name of a woman. According to The Emily Post Institute, Ms...

), etc.
English has borrowed the "No." abbreviation from the Romance languages
Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...

 word numero (according to the OED
Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...

http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/nox?view=uk, the term is from the Latin numero, which is the ablative form of the word numerus ("number"). Similar forms exist as the word for "number" is derived in other Romance languages: numero in Italian, numéro in French, and número in Spanish and Portuguese), applying it as an abbreviation for the English word "number". This is sometimes written as "Nº", with the superscript o optionally underlined; see numero sign
Numero sign
The numero sign or numero symbol is a typographic abbreviation of the word number indicating ordinal numeration, especially in names and titles...

.


Use of the ordinal-indicating Unicode characters for these kinds of abbreviations is a matter of preference, but can be misleading; the "º" in "Nº", for example, is not intended to indicate ordinality at all.
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