orthography - What do we call the “rd” in “3ʳᵈ” and the “th” in “9ᵗʰ”?


Our numbers have a specific two-letter combination that tells us how the number sounds.


For example



  • 9th

  • 3rd

  • 301st


What do we call these special sounds?



Answer



It's an ordinal indicator:



In written languages, an ordinal indicator is a letter, or group of letters, following a numeral denoting that it is an ordinal number, rather than a cardinal number. Historically these letters were "elevated terminals", that is to say the last few letters of the full word denoting the ordinal form of the number displayed as a superscript. The exact letters used vary in different languages.



(source: Wikipedia)


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