Ordinal indicator

In written languages, an ordinal indicator is a sign adjacent to a numeral denoting that it is an ordinal number, rather than a cardinal number. The exact sign used varies in different languages:

English

The suffixes -st (e.g., 21st), -nd or -d (e.g., 22nd), -rd or -d (e.g., 23rd), and -th (e.g., 24th) are used. Formerly, these indicators were superscripts (2^nd, 34^th) but by the late 20th century, formatting them on the line was favoured. The superscript style has, since the 1990s, been revived somewhat thanks to word processors that format ordinal indicators as superscripts automatically.

French

The suffixes ^-er (e.g., 1^er — premier), ^-re (e.g., 1^re — première), and ^-e (e.g., 2^e — deuxième). These indicators use superscript formatting whenever it is available.

Dutch

Unlike other Germanic languages, Dutch follows the French layout, with ^-e For the numbers ranging from 2 until 19 (e.g., 2^e — tweede, 13^e — dertiende), and ^-ste for all other numbers (e.g. 1^ste — eerste, 21^ste — eenentwintigste, 1000^ste — duizendste). These indicators use superscript formatting whenever it is available.

Danish, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Serbian

A period or full stop is written after the numeral. The same usage, apparently borrowed from German, is now a standard in Polish, where it replaced the superscript of the last phoneme (following complex declension and gender patterns, e.g., 1-szy, 7-ma, 24-te, 100-ny; use of such contractions is considered an error).

Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish

The suffixes ^-o and ^-a are appended to the numeral depending on whether the number's grammatical gender is masculine or feminine respectively. As with French, these signs are preferably superscripted, but in contrast, they are often underlined as well. Some character sets, including Unicode, provide characters specifically for use as ordinal indicators in these languages: º and ª. The masculine ordinal indicator (º) is often confused with the degree sign (°), which looks very similar in many fonts. To distinguish them, note that the degree sign is a uniform circle and is never underlined, while the letter o may be oval or elliptical and have a varying stroke width. The letter o may be also underlined.

In Spanish primer (an adjective form of primero) is not abbreviated as 1º but as 1^er. Spanish also uses the indicators in some abbreviations (Vº Bº, visto bueno, "Approved"; Mª, María, a Spanish name frequently used in compounds like José Mª).

See also

• Numero sign