ordinal
/ˈɔːdɪn(ə)l
/noun
1 short for ordinal number.In 1907 he introduced special types of ordinals in an attempt to prove Cantor's continuum hypothesis....
- Having solved the open problem posed by Davenport on writing numbers as the sums of fifth powers, Conway began to become interested in infinite ordinals.
- In this latter book she presented a 30 page appendix on the theory of infinite cardinals and ordinals.
2 Christian Church, historical A service book, especially one with the forms of service used at ordinations.The report continues with a discussion of the various ministries of deacons, including the basis as expressed in the ordinal at ordination in a new trial liturgy in the Diocese of Salisbury.
adjective
1Relating to the order of something in a series: ordinal scales...
- The answers were transformed to an ordinal scale with values from 0 to 6.
- The Mann-Whitney U test is appropriate when the independent variable has two levels and the dependent variable is measured on an ordinal scale.
- To account for this bias, we transformed the outcome variables to an ordinal scale with 5 categories.
1.1Relating to an ordinal number.
2 Biology Relating to a taxonomic order.The present study suggests that tube-foot morphology may be useful as a taxonomic character at the ordinal level....
- While all of the phyla but one were established during the Cambrian explosion, taxonomic increases during the Ordovician were manifest at lower taxonomic levels although ordinal level diversity doubled.
- Mammalian phylogenetics at the ordinal level remains one of the outstanding problems in systematics because of the lack of congruence between different data sets.
Origin
Middle English (in sense 2 of the noun): the noun from medieval Latin ordinale (neuter); the adjective from late Latin ordinalis 'relating to order in a series', from Latin ordo, ordin- (see order).