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: Commonly, ordinal numbers, or ordinals for short, are numbers used to denote the position in an ordered sequence: first, second, third, fourth, etc. ... In linguistics, cardinal numbers is the name given to number words that are used for quantity (one, two, three), as opposed to ordinal numbers, words that are used for order (first, second, third). ...

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 English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... A superscript is a number, figure, or symbol that appears above the normal line of type, at the right or left of another symbol or text. ... A word processor (also more formally known as a document preparation system) is a computer application used for the production (including composition, editing, formatting, and possibly printing) of any sort of viewable or printed material. ... The Serbian language is one of the standard versions of the Å tokavian dialect (former standard was known as Serbo-Croatian language). ... A full stop or period, also called a full point, is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of several different types of sentences in English and several other languages. ... It has been suggested that natural gender be merged into this article or section. ... An underline is a horizontal line placed below a portion of text to show emphasis, or for titles of longer works (books, movies, etc. ... A character encoding is a code that pairs a set of characters (such as an alphabet or syllabary) with a set of something else, such as numbers or electrical pulses. ... Due to technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... For other uses of degree, see degree (disambiguation) In Unicode, the degree sign is U+00B0 (°). The HTML code for it is °. Due to a similar appearance in some fonts in print and on computer screens, some other characters may be mistakenly substituted for it: the masculine ordinal indicator... An oval or ovoid was originally an egg shape (from Latin OVVM); it is now usually used to refer to ellipses, but can also mean any similar shape, such as egg shapes or race-course shapes (a semicircle on either side of a quadrilateral). ... Elliptical may refer to: Ellipse: a shape and mathematical construct Elliptical trainer: an exercise machine This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...

See also

• Numero sign

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