- What do we call the “rd” in “3ʳᵈ” and the “th” in “9ᵗʰ”?
@WS2 In speech, very nearly always In writing, much less so I think what may be going on is that one just assumes that “June 1” is pronounced “June First”, or “4 July” as “the Fourth of July”
- abbreviations - When were st, nd, rd, and th, first used - English . . .
In English, Wikipedia says these started out as superscripts: 1 st, 2 nd, 3 rd, 4 th, but during the 20 th century they migrated to the baseline: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th So the practice started during the Roman empire, and probably was continuously used since then in the Romance languages I don't know when it was adopted in English Here is a
- etymology - What comes after (Primary,unary),(secondary,binary . . .
4th = quaternary; 5th = quinary; 6th = senary; 7th = septenary; 8th = octonary; 9th = nonary; 10th = denary; 12th = duodenary; 20th = vigenary These come from the Latin roots The -n-ones come as well from Latin but this time are distributive adjectives, "one each, two each, etc "; they are always used in plural They were sometimes also used
- What is the correct term to describe primary, secondary, etc
Its use may refer to size, importance, chronology, etc They are different from the cardinal numbers (one, two, three, etc ) referring to the quantity Ordinal numbers are alternatively written in English with numerals and letter suffixes: 1st, 2nd or 2d, 3rd or 3d, 4th, 11th, 21st, 101st, 477th, etc
- word usage - Running for the 4th time versus for a 4th time - English . . .
Either phrase is correct and can be used interchangeably in that particular case The one exception I might consider is if something is running for a 4th time within a certain span of time For example, the course is running for the 4th time in 2 years would be correct, but the course is running for a 4th time in 2 years would be incorrect
- From the 4th to the 8th of June - [date ranges]
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- Usage of second third fourth . . . last
The 4th is next to last or last but one (penultimate) The 3rd is second from (or to) last or last but two (antepenultimate) The 2nd, is third from (or to) last or last but three According to Google Ngram Viewer there are some occurrences of preantepenultimate in the corpus
- which one is correct I will be on leave starting on October 4th till . . .
In my opinion "starting on" and "till" don't really go together so I wouldn't use option 1 The phrasing "on leave from X till Y" can be misinterpreted to mean that Y will be your first day back at work, so I wouldn't use option 3 without adding "(inclusive)"
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