ordinal indicator

In written languages, an ordinal indicator is a character, or group of characters, following a numeral denoting that it is an ordinal number, rather than a cardinal number. In English orthography, this corresponds to the suffixes ''-st'', ''-nd'', ''-rd'', ''-th'' in written ordinals (represented either on the line ''1st'', ''2nd'', ''3rd'', ''4th'' or as superscript, ).

Also commonly encountered are the superscript or superior (and often underlined) masculine ordinal indicator, , and feminine ordinal indicator, , originally from Romance and then via the cultural influence of Italian, as in 1º '' primo'' and 1ª '' prima''. In correct typography, the ordinal indicators and should be distinguishable from other characters.

The practice of underlined (or doubly underlined) superscripted abbreviations was common in 19th-century writing (not limited to ordinal indicators in particular, and also extant in the numero sign ), and was also found in handwritten English until at least the late 19th century (e.g. "first" abbreviated or ''1'').

Usage

In Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Galician, the ordinal indicators and are appended to the numeral depending on whether the grammatical gender is masculine or feminine. The indicator may be given an underline but this is not ubiquitous. In digital typography, this depends on the font: Cambria and Calibri, for example, have underlined ordinal indicators, while most other fonts do not.

Examples of the usage of ordinal indicators in Italian are:
*; ('first'),
*; ('second')
*; ('third')
Galician also forms its ordinal numbers this way, while Asturian follows a similar system where is used for the masculine gender, for the feminine gender and for the neuter gender.

In Spanish, using the two final letters of the word as it is spelled is not allowed, except in the cases of (an apocope of ) before singular masculine nouns, which is not abbreviated as but as , of (an apocope of ) before singular masculine nouns, which is not abbreviated as but as , and of compound ordinal numbers ending in "" or "". For instance, "twenty-first" is before a masculine noun, and its abbreviation is . Since none of these words are shortened before feminine nouns, their correct forms for those cases are and . These can be represented as and . As with other abbreviations in Spanish, the ordinal numbers have a period ".", which is placed ''before'' the indicator. Portuguese follows the same method.

Origins

The practice of indicating ordinals with superscript suffixes may originate with the practice of writing a superscript ''o'' to indicate a Latin ablative in pre-modern scribal practice.
This ablative desinence happened to be frequently combined with ordinal numerals indicating dates (as in ''tertio die'' (written ''iii^o die'') "on the third day" or in Anno Domini years, as in (written or similarly) "in the thousandth ..year after the incarnation of our lord Jesus Christ").

The usage of terminals in the vernacular languages of Europe derives from Latin usage, as practised by scribes in monasteries and chanceries before writing in the vernacular became established. The terminal letters used depend on the gender of the item to be ordered and the case in which the ordinal adjective is stated, for example ("the first day", nominative case, masculine), but ("on the first day", ablative case masculine), shown as I^o or i^o. As monumental inscriptions often refer to days on which events happened, e.g. "he died on the tenth of June", the ablative case is generally used: X^o () with the month stated in the genitive case. Examples:
*I^o , "on the first day of July"
*X^o
*XX^o
*L^o
*C^o
*M^o

Design

The masculine ordinal indicator may be confused with the degree sign (U+00B0), which looks very similar and which is provided on the Italian and Latin American keyboard layouts. It was common in the early days of computers to use the same character for both. The degree sign is a uniform circle and is never underlined. The masculine ordinal indicator is the shape of a lower-case letter , and thus may be oval or elliptical, and may have a varying line thickness.

Ordinal indicators may also be underlined. It is not mandatory in Portugal nor in Brazil, but it is preferred in some fonts to avoid confusion with the degree sign.

Also, the ordinal indicators should be distinguishable from superscript characters. The top of the ordinal indicators (i.e., the top of the elevated letter and letter ) must be aligned with the cap height of the font. The alignment of the top of superscripted letters and will depend on the font.

The line thickness of the ordinal indicators is always proportional to the line thickness of the other characters of the font. Many fonts just shrink the characters (making them thinner) to draw superscripts.

Encoding

The Romance feminine and masculine ordinal indicators were adopted into
the 8-bit ECMA-94 encoding in 1985 and the ISO 8859-1 encoding in 1987 (both based on DEC's Multinational Character Set designed for VT220), at positions 170 (xAA) and 186 (xBA), respectively.
ISO 8859-1 was incorporated as the first 256 code points of ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode in 1991.
The Unicode characters are thus:
*
*

There are superscript versions of the letters and in Unicode, these are different characters and should not be used as ordinal indicators.

The majority of character sets intended to support Galician, Portuguese and/or Spanish have those two characters encoded. In detail (in hexadecimal):

Typing

Portuguese and Spanish keyboard layouts are the only ones on which the characters are directly accessible through a dedicated key: for "º" and for "ª". On other keyboard layouts these characters are accessible only through a set of keystrokes.

On Windows can be obtained by and by .

In MacOS keyboards, can be obtained by pressing and can be obtained by pressing .

In Linux, can be obtained by or , and by or . On ChromeOS, the same , facilities are included in the UK-Extended language setting but the Compose function requires a (Google) add-on to Chrome.

On many mobile devices keyboards ( tablets, smartphones, etc.) and can be obtained by holding the keys and , respectively, and then selecting the desired character. For this option to appear, the selected input language may need to be changed to one where these symbols are used natively. For example, on Microsoft Swiftkey, both are available when 'Italian' is enabled, but not when only 'English' is.

Similar conventions

Some languages use superior letters as a typographic convention for abbreviations. Oftentimes, the ordinal indicators and are used in this sense, and not to indicate ordinal numbers. Some might say that this is a misuse of ordinal indicators:
* Spanish uses superscript letters and ordinal indicators in some abbreviations, such as for ("approved"); for ("number"); for (an honorific); for , a Spanish name frequently used in compounds like ; and for , administrator. The superscript characters and indicators are always preceded by a period. Traditionally they have been underlined, but this is optional and less frequent today. Portuguese forms some abbreviations in the same manner. For example: for (an honorific), for ( Ltd.), and for (Ms.).
* English has borrowed the "No." abbreviation from the Romance-language word ''numero'', which itself derives from the Latin word ''numero'', the ablative case of the word ''numerus'' ("number"). This is sometimes written as "N^o", with the superscript ''o'' optionally underlined, or sometimes with the ordinal indicator. In this case the ordinal indicator would simply represent the letter "o" in ''numero''; see numero sign.

Ordinal dot

In Basque, Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Latvian, Norwegian, Slovak, Slovene, Turkish, among other languages, a period or full stop is written after the numeral. In Polish the period can be omitted if there is no ambiguity whether a given numeral is ordinal or cardinal. The only exception are variables in mathematics ("k+1-szy" — "(k+1)st").
Writing out the endings for various cases, as sometimes happens in Czech and Slovak, is considered incorrect and uneducated. Should a period or full stop follow this dot, it is omitted. In Czech and Slovak, numerals with ordinal dot are mostly used only in tables, lists etc., or in case of large (or long) numbers; within a sentence it is recommended to write out the form with letters in full.

The Serbian standard of Serbo-Croatian (unlike the Croatian and Bosnian standards) uses the dot in role of the ordinal indicator only past Arabic numerals, while Roman numerals are used without a dot.

There is a problem with autocorrection, mobile editors etc. which often forces a capital initial letter to the word following the ordinal number.

Other suffixes

English

* ''-st'' is used with numbers ending in ''1'' (e.g. ''1st'', pronounced ''first'')
* ''-nd'' is used with numbers ending in ''2'' (e.g. ''92nd'', pronounced ''ninety-second'')
* ''-rd'' is used with numbers ending in ''3'' (e.g. ''33rd'', pronounced ''thirty-third'')
* As an exception to the above rules, all the "teen" numbers ending with ''11'', ''12'', etc. use ''-th'' (e.g. ''11th'', pronounced ''eleventh'', ''112th'', pronounced ''one hundred ndth'')
* ''-th'' is used for all other numbers (e.g. 9th, pronounced ''ninth'').
* One archaic variant uses a singular ''-d'' for numbers ending in 2 or 3 (e.g. ''92d'' or ''33d'')

In 19th-century handwriting, these terminals were often elevated, that is to say written as superscripts (e.g. ). With the gradual introduction of the typewriter in the late 19th century, it became common to write them on the baseline in typewritten texts,
and this usage even became recommended in certain 20th-century style guides.
Thus, the 17th edition of ''The Chicago Manual of Style'' states: "The letters in ordinal numbers should not appear as superscripts (e.g., 122nd not )", as do the ''Bluebook'' and style guides by the ''Council of Science Editors'', Microsoft, and Yahoo. Two problems are that superscripts are used "most often in citations" and are "tiny and hard to read". Some word processors format ordinal indicators as superscripts by default (e.g. Microsoft Word). Style guide author Jack Lynch (Rutgers) recommends turning off automatic superscripting of ordinals in Microsoft Word, because "no professionally printed books use superscripts".

French

French uses the ordinal indicators (), in feminine (), (). French also uses the indicator for the variant ; in feminine this indicator becomes : . In plural, all these indicators take a S: (), (), (), (), ().

These indicators use superscript formatting whenever it is available.

Catalan

The rule in Catalan 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" ( '' '', '' '', '' '', '' ''), but the first few ordinals are irregular, affecting the abbreviations of the masculine forms. Superscripting is not standard.

Dutch

Unlike other Germanic languages, Dutch is similar to English in this respect: the French layout with ' used to be popular, but the recent spelling changes now prescribe the suffix . Optionally and may be used, but this is more complex:  (),  (),  (),  ()...

Finnish

In Finnish orthography, when the numeral is followed by its head noun (which indicates the grammatical case of the ordinal), it is sufficient to write a period or full stop after the numeral: "In the competition, I finished in 2nd place". However, if the head noun is omitted, the ordinal indicator takes the form of a morphological suffix, which is attached to the numeral with a colon. In the nominative case, the suffix is for 1 and 2, and for larger numerals: "I came 2nd, and my brother came 3rd". This is derived from the endings of the spelled-out ordinal numbers: , , '', '', , , ...

The system becomes rather complicated when the ordinal needs to be inflected, as the ordinal suffix is adjusted according to the case ending: (nominative case, which has no ending), (genitive case with ending ), (partitive case with ending ), ( inessive case with ending ), ( illative case with ending ), etc. Even native speakers sometimes find it difficult to exactly identify the ordinal suffix, as its borders with the word stem and the case ending may appear blurred. In such cases it may be preferable to write the ordinal word entirely with letters and particularly is rare even in the nominative case, as it is not significantly shorter than the full word .

Irish

Numerals from ''3'' up form their ordinals uniformly by adding the suffix : , etc. When the ordinal is written out, the suffix adheres to the spelling restrictions imposed by the broad/slender difference in consonants and is written after slender consonants; but when written as numbers, only the suffix itself () is written. In the case of ''4'' (), the final syllable is syncopated before the suffix, and in the case of ''9'' (), ''20'' (), and ''1000'' (), the final vowel is assimilated into the suffix.

Most multiples of ten end in a vowel in their cardinal form and form their ordinal form by adding the suffix to their genitive singular form, which ends in ; this is not reflected in writing. Exceptions are ''20'' () and ''40'' (), both of whom form their ordinals by adding the suffix directly to the cardinal ( and ).

When counting objects (2) becomes and (4) becomes .

As in French, the vigesimal system is widely used, particularly in people's ages. – 95.

The numbers ''1'' () and ''2'' () both have two separate ordinals: one regularly formed by adding , and one suppletive form (). The regular forms are restricted in their usage to actual numeric contexts, when counting. The latter are also used in counting, especially , but are used in broader, more abstract senses of 'first' and 'second' (or 'other'). In their broader senses, and are not written as and , though and may in a numeric context be read aloud as and (e.g., may be read as or as ).

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 , 2-я вторая , 2-й второй (note that in the second example the vowel letter я represents two phonemes, one of which () is ''consonant'').

Swedish

The general rule is that (for 1 and 2) or (for all other numbers, except , et cetera, but including and ) is appended to the numeral. The reason is that and respectively end the ordinal number words. The ordinals for 1 and 2 may however be given an form ( and instead of and ) when used about a male person (masculine natural gender), and if so they are written and . When indicating dates, suffixes are never used. Examples: (first grade (in elementary school)), (third edition), but . Furthermore, suffixes can be left out if the number obviously is an ordinal number, example: (3rd ed). Using a full stop as an ordinal indicator is considered archaic, but still occurs in military contexts. Example: (5th company).

Representation as prefix

Numbers in Malay and Indonesian are preceded by the ordinal prefix ; for example, , "seventh". The exception is which means "first".

Numbers in Filipino are preceded by the ordinal prefix or (the latter subject to sandhi; for example, or , "seventh". The exception is , which means "first".

In Chinese and Japanese, an ordinal number is prefixed by / ; for example, "first", "second".

In Korean, an ordinal number is prefixed by or suffixed by ; for example, "first", "second".

See also

* Numero sign
* Superior letter

References

External links

* .

Windows keyboard layouts

Apple keyboard layouts

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Typographical symbols