I hate when they are superscripted but sometimes editors make me do it. It messes up the leading and the look of things.

My rule of thumb is: if the typeface includes ordinal letters, and my line-length is long enough that it doesn’t look too weird, I try to superscript them.

To me it’s the same issue as with text figures. Numbers aren’t more important than the rest of the text, and shouldn’t be bigger than the rest of the text — and likewise, ordinals are less important than the rest of the text, and hence, it should be smaller than the rest of the text…

By the way, yes, they are called ordinals, “because they are used for ordinal numbers: first, second, third.” (Bringhurst)

When I was in school (not for design), we weren’t told to use superscript. I think it is just MS Word’s propensity to superscript them that caused me to doubt what I was taught.

I have almost ten different style guides at my disposal and not one even mentions ordinals. Go figure.

Odd, I have almost thirty different style guides on my shelf, and only one doesn’t mention ordinals specifically, although reading that section, they simply ignore them altogether.

In most cases, especially If you’re font doesn’t include ordinals, it’s best to write out the term fifth rather than 5th.

CMS (Chicago Mother of Style) says they follow the same rules as stand-alone numerals, which is to say, spell out 1-100 before resorting to mixing numerals and letters (9.8). As for superscripts, it doesn’t address them specifically really, but it doesn’t use them in its own text. I take this as a de facto endorsement of the policy that ordinals ought not to be superscript in running text.

Note that in 17.52, CMS says that it’s okay to reformat superscripted ordinal endings when citing the title of a book (while it is not okay to spell it out if the original title contains number-letter ordinals).

>MS Word’s propensity to superscript them

This can be turned off in Word by going to Tools > Autocorrect Options > Autoformat As You Type and unchecking the “Ordinals (1st) with superscript” box. Also go to the Autoformat tab in the Autocorrect Options dialog box and uncheck the same box.

MS Word’s propensity to superscript them

Not a propensity, but a default to an 18th century practice.
Go figure.

To me it’s the same issue as with text figures. Numbers aren’t more important than the rest of the text, and shouldn’t be bigger than the rest of the text — and likewise, ordinals are less important than the rest of the text, and hence, it should be smaller than the rest of the text…

It isn’t simply size that make something stand out. It isn’t that lining (uppercase) numbers are bigger than old style (lowercase) figures that bothers most of us. In fact, aside from zero and one, they are pretty much the same size. But they form a “visual block,” and that is visually disturbing. To me, superscripting “th” etc. calls unwanted attention, even if smaller, and raises the same problem

Just a 20th century guys perspective.

It isn’t simply size that make something stand out. […] In fact, aside from zero and one, they are pretty much the same size.

…and so are all the lowercase letters with ascenders and descenders. With text figures (old style, lowercase, etc.), though the glyph may be physically as big as the titling figures - most of the visual information is contained within the x-height.

I do see your point, though, and partly agree; which is why I’m pretty flexible when it comes to ordinals. I don’t think they ‘deserve’ to be on the x-height, as I - the almighty typographer don’t deem them to have enough useful information, and being a bit conservative, I like to keep the English-teachers of 1729 happy. And generally, I try to stick with ‘fifth’ on numbers up to ten.

I do like, though, the Norwegian way of dealing with ordinals. Instead of the ‘th’ ‘rd’, etc. suffix, a punctation mark is used to mark the fact that something is being counted “It was the 5. day of the celebrations”.

The “rd” in 3rd or “st” in 1st is no different to me than adding an “ing” or “ed” to a verb to alter its grammatical status a bit. I wouldn’t dream of making them ordinals. I cringe every time someone sends me a printout from Word with these distracting little “st’s and “rd’s” bouncing around on the lines.

It depends on context:

Superscript: I bought my 3rd penny-farthing bicycle from a Prussian salesman.
Roman: I bought my 3rd bike from a German salesperson.

No, it doesn’t, at least in North America.

In a hugely overwhelming majority of style guides here, one would be specifically directed to write “third” in both cases.

I’d agree with Linda. In GB one is more likely to see “18th century” (no superscripts) and in the US “eighteenth century” is more common, at least in books.

No, I completely agree (see my earlier post)—I was only trying to snarkily illustrate that superscripted number/letter ordinals are archaic.

Yes, we would write out eighteenth. But I worked on an art book recently where there were a lot of addresses, and was instructed by the editor to superscript, for example, West 10th Street or 4th floor studio. I queried him but was told it was “house style” and I’d already butted heads with him over the ’e’ in Acknowledgments (he wanted Acknowledgements, I won that battle).

“MS Word’s propensity to superscript them”

Funny thing about that—a couple of years ago when all the flak came out about the faked letter from Bush’s old CO came out, one of the ways they (our own Thomas Phinney) saw evidence of forgery was to notice the default use of ordinals in the letter. The letter predated MS Word and the whole digital era so something was amiss.

ChrisL

PS: I like the idea of only using ordinals if they are part of the typeface. That not only eliminates the leading issue but avoids the anemic look of reduced lowercase by the pagemakeup software.

I like superscripted ordinals, but only if they’re real superscript, rather than shrunken-down full-size numbers a la Word.

Cheers,

T

I also prefer superscripted ordinals, if they are proper.

I can’t pinpoint exactly where in school i was taught that method, but I prefer that to leaving them on the baseline. I also prefer having the number written out in most cases however. It might also come from setting bilingual text where in French it’s ’41e’ and the ’e’ must be superscript.

What do typophiles think is the best way to present the ordinal of a variable? As in: “This is the nth time I’ve asked this question.” I’ve seen superscripts, normal text, and hyphens used.

I think italic, unhyphenated, unsuperscripted (as in nth) makes the most sense. Italicizing the variable would be in keeping with how you would treat a variable if it were standing alone. And if it is italicized, then the hyphen is superfluous. The superscript could potentially be intrusive or mar the color of the text, and might make scanning the text difficult if there are superscripted markers for footnotes.

I find superscripted ordinals following an x-height letter or shorter oldstyle figure a bit odd.

T