ordinal number
noun
Simple meaning
A word that expresses the relative position of an item in a sequence.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
awrduhnuhlnuhmberSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈɔɹdənəlnəmbɚ
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
grammar
A word that expresses the relative position of an item in a sequence.
arithmetic
The number designating place in an ordered sequence
arithmetic
A natural number used to denote position in a sequence.
set theory
Such a number generalised to correspond to any cardinal number (the size of some set); formally, the order type of some well-ordered set of some cardinality a, which represents an equivalence class of well-ordered sets (exactly those of cardinality a) under the equivalence relation "existence of an order-preserving bijection".
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: A word that expresses the relative position of an item in a sequence.
Used this way, ordinal number is a specialist word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. This is a grammar or language-study use: it describes how language works, so it appears in teaching and reference writing.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Specialist/technical
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Specialized
- Connotation
- Clinical and technical
- Usage feel
- Technical and specialized
Where it naturally appears
- Academic writing
- Education/classroom
- Technical/specialist writing
Usage note
In general conversation this sense usually needs explaining — outside its field, people reach for a plainer word.
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.