Ordinal Oddities

October 2, 2014 / Melody Smith / Comments Off on Ordinal Oddities

Many linguists believe that English is one of the most difficult languages to learn, and not because of the pronunciation challenges, but for the exceptions to every rule. For us word geeks, some oddities that we explore are more than just humorous, they are educational (and sometimes a bit frustrating). This was found in the blog post, “Why is today the first, not the oneth?” in the blog, Wordlady.

For example, in many languages, the ordinal associated with the number “one” is not created along regular lines by just adding whatever the ordinal suffix is (in English, -th) to the number. This was true for Old English as well and Scandinavian languages.

The number two didn’t fair much better. Today is October twoth, 2014.

Melody K. Smith

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Melody Smith

Melody K. Smith has provided organizational, social media and digital communication services to a large non-profit for the past twenty years. Prior to that she championed employee engagement and communications in the healthcare field. She holds a Bachelors degree in Marketing. When not wrangling and writing TaxoDiary content for your reading pleasure, Melody writes fiction, rescues dogs and throws legendary dinner parties.