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Ordinal number

(grammar) A word that expresses the relative position of an item in a sequence.

📖 Definitions of "Ordinal number"

noun
  1. 1

    (grammar) A word that expresses the relative position of an item in a sequence.

    "First, second and third are the ordinal numbers corresponding to one, two and three."

  2. 2

    A natural number used to denote position in a sequence.

    "In the expression a3, the "3" is an ordinal number."

  3. 3

    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".

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