Ordinal

Ordinal (pronounced awr-dn-uhl)

(1) In botany and zoology, of, relating to, or characteristic of an order in the biological classification of plants or animals.

(2) Of or relating to order, rank, or position in a series; denoting a certain position in a sequence of numbers.

(3) In church administration, a directory of ecclesiastical services.

(4) In church administration, a book containing the forms for the ordination of priests, consecration of bishops etc.

(5) In numbering conventions (usually as ordinal numeral), any of the numbers that express degree, quality, or position in a series, as first, second, and third (and thus distinguished from cardinal numbers).

(6) In mathematics, a symbol denoting both the cardinal number and the ordering of a given set, being identical for two ordered sets having elements that can be placed into one-to-one correspondence, the correspondence preserving the order of the elements; in logic maths a measure of not only the size of a set but also the order of its elements.

1350–1400: Middle English from the Old French ordinel from the Medieval Latin ōrdināle, noun use of the neuter of ōrdinālis (showing order, denoting an order of succession), the sense being “orderly”, ōrdinālis denoting order or place in a series, from Latin ōrdō (order), (genitive ordinis), the construct being ōrdō (order) + -alia (the Latin adjectival suffix).  The first sense of ordinal was that adopted to describe ecclesiastical documents, the meaning "marking the place or position of an object in an order or series" unknown until the 1590s.  Ordinal is a noun and adjective, the adverb is ordinally.

Conventions

In English there are conventions to guide the way written text is handled in oral speech.  Where a word or phrase, however familiar in English, remains foreign, it should, when spoken, be rendered in translation so, the written text “Hillary Clinton is, inter alia, crooked”, is spoken as “Hillary Clinton is, among other things, crooked.”  Where a foreign word or phrase has been assimilated into English it is treated as native so the written text “Hillary Clinton’s statement was the usual mix of lies, half-truths, evasions etc.” is spoken as “Hillary Clinton’s statement was the usual mix of lies, half-truths, evasions etcetera.”  Note the usual shortened form (etc) has traditionally always been followed by a full-stop but there is a welcome revisionist movement which argues it too has become an English word (as etcetera is an anglicized form of the Latin et cetera) and thus needs no longer to be treated as a truncation.

Where a foreign word or phrase, however familiar in English, depends for technical or other reasons on the original form to convey its meaning, it should be spoken as written.  Words of this class are often legal Latin such as obiter dictum (a judge's expression of opinion not essential to the verdict and thus not binding as a precedent) and habeas corpus (now a mechanism to challenge the lawfulness of a detention).  Status quo is well-known and widely used as kind of verbal shorthand to avoid clumsy English constructions yet the Status Quo is an Ottoman era firman (decree) which defines certain unchanging understandings among religious communities with respect to nine shared religious sites in Jerusalem and Bethlehem and to translate this to anything else would rob it of the meaning which relies on its historic context.

A DOB written as 07-02-86 is generally understood by Americans but 02 Jul 1986 is preferable because internationally it's unambiguous.  The ordinal numbers (1^st (first), 2^nd (second), 3^rd (third), 4^th (fourth) etc) which sometimes still appear in written text, usually as superscript (set slightly above the normal line of type) reflect actual speech and are often an invaluable aid to the flow and rhythm of text.  However, when used to write dates, they’re wholly unnecessary, a “…needless tribute by the written word to the spoken…” in the words of Randolph Churchill (1911-1968) in a note to his father (one of the few of Randolph’s opinions of which he approved).  The preferred format for dates is 2 Jul 1986 (or 2 July 1986 if added formality is needed); as Randolph’s memo explained, this removes the ambiguity which is inevitable if formats like 2/7/1986 or 7/2/1986 are used and placing the word of the month in the middle separates the two numbers.  Randolph Churchill was writing in 1949, long before the storage of data in digital form entered the mainstream.  Because of the way computers usually handle the indexing of such things, if using the date to name files, sub-directories etc, advice has long been to adopt the convention YYYYMMDD (19860702).  That however is but a Y2K approach and may, eight-thousand years odd from now, contribute to the Y10K crisis.  Some have been pondering this: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2550