Ordinal Numbers in English: The 1st to 100th Chart and Common Mistakes

You look at "March 5" on your calendar and in your head it sounds like "march five." A native speaker reads that line as "March the fifth" or "March fifth." Same string of characters, two different sound sequences, and that gap is why you can hear a whole scheduling sentence and still miss the date.

Ordinal numbers show up in birthdays, floor numbers, rankings, chapter numbers, centuries, and even fractions. They're everywhere, yet almost nobody teaches you to hear them. The -th ending lands right on the hardest spot for Vietnamese speakers: Vietnamese has no /θ/ sound, and even less so those glued-together three-consonant clusters like /fθ/ in fifth or /lfθ/ in twelfth.

This page has a full table from 1st to 31st for looking up dates, plus the round tens up to 100th, a spelling section for the words people get wrong most often, and a section devoted entirely to the ear: spelling twelfth correctly and picking out twelfth in real fast speech are two different skills.

The transcriptions in the tables below follow standard British English. American English differs mainly in the /r/ sound and in how the t between two vowels gets softened.

• Rule: add -th, except for the first three
• Table of ordinal numbers 1st to 31st
• Round tens, hundreds, thousands
• Six commonly misspelled spots
• Abbreviations 1st, 2nd, 3rd and how to pick the ending
• What ordinal numbers are used for
• Hearing the -th ending
• Frequently asked questions about ordinal numbers
• Where to go from here

Rule: add -th, except for the first three

The base rule is short enough to learn in thirty seconds: take the cardinal number and add -th at the end. four becomes fourth, six becomes sixth, ten becomes tenth, eleven becomes eleventh. If you're not sure about the base list of cardinal numbers, the table of cardinal numbers in English is worth a stop before reading further.

What's left are the words that don't follow the rule. The first three change shape entirely, and a small group drops or swaps a letter before taking the -th ending.

Every number ending in -y follows the same pattern as twenty: thirty becomes thirtieth, forty becomes fortieth, ninety becomes ninetieth. Master these eight rows and you can handle everything else with the plain add-th rule.

Table of ordinal numbers 1st to 31st

The table stops at 31 because that's the edge of a month. Anyone learning how to say dates in English needs exactly these thirty-one rows, no more.

Round tens, hundreds, thousands

Beyond dates, large ordinal numbers show up in round-number ages, anniversaries, rankings, and century numbers. What this whole group has in common is that the -tieth ending is spoken lightly and quickly, while the information-carrying part sits at the front of the word.

Combine an odd digit with a round ten the same way as in the previous table: 45th is forty-fifth, 68th is sixty-eighth, 99th is ninety-ninth. Only the last digit carries the ordinal ending — the part before it stays in cardinal form.

Six commonly misspelled spots

These are words you can pronounce correctly and still spell wrong, and the other way around. The six spots below account for most of the mistakes in learners' writing.

1. fifth, not fiveth. five drops ve entirely, keeping only f. fifteenth and fiftieth follow the same pattern.
2. ninth, not nineth. nine drops the final e. But nineteenth and ninetieth keep the e, so don't reason backward from this one.
3. twelfth, not twelvth. The v turns into f. This is the most commonly misspelled word in the whole table.
4. twentieth, not twentyth. Every number ending in -y changes y to ie before taking -th.
5. eighth has only one t. You take eight and add just the letter h. The form eightth doesn't exist.
6. fortieth has no u. four has a u, but forty and fortieth don't. This is a pure spelling irregularity, with no logic behind it.

A quick tip: write these six words on a small piece of paper, stick it where you usually work, and glance at it once before typing each time you need one. After about two weeks your hands will remember on their own, no more looking.

Abbreviations 1st, 2nd, 3rd and how to pick the ending

The abbreviated form is the digit plus the last two letters of the full word. first gives st, second gives nd, third gives rd, and everything else is th. The rule for picking the ending only looks at the final digit.

• If the last digit is 1, the ending is st: 1st, 21st, 41st, 101st.
• If the last digit is 2, the ending is nd: 2nd, 22nd, 62nd, 92nd.
• If the last digit is 3, the ending is rd: 3rd, 23rd, 73rd, 103rd.
• Every other digit takes th: 4th, 8th, 25th, 40th.

The one exception is the three numbers 11, 12, 13. They're read as eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, so they're written 11th, 12th, 13th — not 11st, 12nd, 13rd. The same pattern repeats exactly at 111 and 112, since the ending is still eleventh and twelfth.

As for formatting, the style of raising the last two letters into superscript has gone out of date in digital text. In emails, work documents, and on the web, writing 21st plain at the same font size is standard.

What ordinal numbers are used for

Dates

British speakers say the fifth of May and write 5 May. American speakers say May fifth and write May 5. What they have in common is that the written form usually has no -th ending, but the mouth still says one — so your ear has to be ready for a sound your eyes never see on the page. For how the month names themselves are said, the list of the twelve months with transcriptions has you covered.

Floors of a building

This is a spot that causes real confusion in life, not just on a test. In the same building, two counting systems give you two different floors.

When someone in London arranges to meet you on the first floor, you have to walk up one level. The same phrase in New York means stay right where you are.

Rank and sequence

She came second in the race. He finished third. This is my first time here. For a list with several points, people open with first of all, then second, third. In work conversations, first of all is almost a fixed opening phrase and barely carries any counting meaning anymore.

Centuries and historical milestones

the twenty-first century, the nineteenth century, the Fourth of July. Century numbers are always in ordinal form and always come with the.

Fractions

The denominator of a fraction is exactly an ordinal number. The numerator uses a cardinal number, the denominator uses an ordinal number, and when the numerator is greater than one, the denominator takes an s. The word quarter in the table below also comes back in how to tell time in English, in the two phrases a quarter past and a quarter to.

Hearing the -th ending

By now you can write and pronounce these correctly. What's left is much harder: recognizing these words when someone else says them at normal speed, without looking at the spelling.

There are three reasons the -th ending escapes your ear. First, /θ/ is a weak fricative, low in energy, easily buried under room noise and breathing sounds. Second, it usually follows one or two other consonants, forming a cluster that even native speakers shorten. In the fifth day, the /θ/ sound nearly vanishes and the sentence sounds like fif day. Third, Vietnamese has no such sound, so your ear has no slot yet to file it into.

The pair that causes the most damage is teenth versus tieth. Two words for two dates half a month apart, or two rankings far apart, differing only in the lightest part of the word — the ending.

The fix isn't more hours of listening. You can listen to podcasts for a whole year and still miss the -th ending, because listening for the gist doesn't force you to catch every final sound. What does force you to do that is dictation practice: listen to a sentence, then write it down exactly. Check it against the transcript afterward — if you wrote fifteen where the original said fifteenth, that's concrete evidence, not a vague feeling.

At WELE, every sentence you transcribe is graded word by word, so a missing -th ending shows up right away instead of getting lost in the crowd. A library of over 800 podcast episodes with transcripts lets you pick out episodes packed with dates and figures to drill this exact word group. Words you get wrong are brought back for review using spaced repetition, meaning you meet them again right as the memory is about to fade, not all crammed into one session.

A tight practice session just for the -th ending: pick an episode with dates in it, listen sentence by sentence, transcribe, check against the original, circle every wrong ending. Do this for fifteen minutes a day for two weeks. If you want the full process framework, the five steps of effective dictation practice walks through each stage. And if you're not sure where you currently stand, the free listening level test gives you a starting score to compare against after a few weeks.

Frequently asked questions about ordinal numbers

In formal writing, should I write 1st or first?

For small numbers within a sentence, writing it out in words reads more naturally: This is her first attempt. For dates, tables, rankings, and street addresses, the abbreviated form is shorter and widely accepted: 21st Street, 3rd place. Pick one style and stick with it within the same document.

If I write May 5 but read it as May fifth, is that wrong?

Not wrong. Writing and pronunciation part ways right here. You write May 5 or 5 May, but the mouth still reads the ordinal ending. British speakers add the and of, forming the fifth of May; American speakers usually drop both.

twelfth is hard to say — is it okay to drop a sound?

Native speakers shorten this cluster too when speaking fast, usually swallowing the /f/ sound and producing something close to twelth. It's good if you can manage the full form, but don't stop an entire sentence just to pronounce one word perfectly. If you want to tackle this hard consonant group at the root, the overview of English pronunciation goes through each consonant cluster.

What form should I use when filling in a date-of-birth field?

International forms almost always use plain digits in a preset template, like DD/MM/YYYY or MM/DD/YYYY. You fill in bare numbers, no -th ending added. The ordinal ending only shows up when writing a date within a sentence or in a letter.

Why don't 11, 12, 13 use st, nd, rd?

Because the abbreviated ending follows the pronunciation, not the digit. Those three are read as eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth — all three end in th, so the abbreviated form is th too.

Where to go from here

The table above sticks in memory far faster when you use it for listening, not just for looking things up. Pick a short podcast episode that mentions dates, listen sentence by sentence and transcribe it, then comb specifically through the spots with a -th ending. After a few sessions, what used to slide right past your ear will start to pause there long enough for you to catch it. You can start for free right now at WELE's self-study English roadmap.