ordinal number
"ordinal-number" is a 13-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“ordinal number” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 14
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - A word that expresses the relative position of an item in a sequence.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | ordinal number |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 14 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “ordinal number” sits in English frequency
Rare enough to double-check
ordinal number is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 3 senses are on record.
Zero misspellings are on record for ordinal number in our index, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
Wiktionary doesn't record an etymology for this headword, so its spelling is easiest to reason about phoneme by phoneme, absent a documented history. The correct English form is ordinal number, spelled O-R-D-I-N-A-L- -N-U-M-B-E-R.
Definition
- 1A word that expresses the relative position of an item in a sequence.
- 2A natural number used to denote position in a sequence.
- 3Such 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".
Antonyms
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you spell "ordinal number"?
What does "ordinal number" mean?
What language does "ordinal number" come from?
Is PlainSpell free to use?
Using “ordinal number”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is O-R-D-I-N-A-L- -N-U-M-B-E-R - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.