Ordinal indicator

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º redirects here. It is not to be confused with the degree symbol °.

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.

1 Usage
2 Similar conventions
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Usage

[edit] English

The suffixes -st (e.g. 21st), -nd or -d (e.g. 22nd or 22d), -rd or -d (e.g. 23rd or 23d), 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 as some word processors format ordinal indicators as superscripts automatically.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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 now prescribe the suffix -e. Optionally -ste and -de may be used.

[edit] Danish, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Slovenian, Serbian, Turkish

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).

[edit] 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 provide characters specifically for use as ordinal indicators in these languages: º and ª (in Unicode U+00BA and U00AA^[1]). The masculine ordinal indicator U+00BA (º) is often confused with the degree sign U+00B0 (°), which looks very similar in many fonts. 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 also be underlined.

In Spanish, primer (an adjective form of primero) before singular masculine nouns, is not abbreviated as 1º but as 1^er. The same happens with tercer (an adjective form of tercero) before singular masculine nouns, which is not abbreviated as 3º but as 3^er

[edit] Irish

The suffix ^-ú is appended to all numerals, 1^ú, 2^ú, 3^ú 4^ú etc., even though the written form does not simply attach the suffix -ú to all numbers, i.e.

a haon - chéad - 1^ú
a dó - dara - 2^ú
a trí - tríú - 3^ú
a ceathair - ceathrú - 4^ú
a cúig - cúigiú - 5^ú

It is planned to remove this inaccurate suffix^{[citation needed]}, i.e. 1^ú Samhain (1st November) will become simply 1 Samhain.

[edit] Similar conventions

Some languages use superior letters 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 Vº Bº for visto bueno ("approved"); and Mª for Maria, a Spanish name frequently used in compounds like José Mª.

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: Ex.^mo for Excelentíssimo (a very formal prefix to the name), L.^da for Limitada (Ltd.), Sr.^a for Senhora (Ms.), etc.

English has borrowed the "No." abbreviation from the Spanish word número, applying it as an abbreviation for the English word "number". This is sometimes written as "Nº", with raised o optionally underlined; see numero sign.

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.