Definition of "ordinal" []

• Being of a specified position in a numbered series: an ordinal rank of seventh. (adjective)
• Of or relating to a taxonomic order. (adjective)
• An ordinal number. (noun)
• Ecclesiastical A book of instructions for daily services. (noun)
• Ecclesiastical A book of forms for ordination. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Consider the confusing legacy of the term ordinal which, while more consistently used then all of the above terms, has the disadvantage that all of them have the potential to be intuitive, something that ordinal will never have going for it."
• "Reinach finds that so-called ordinal numbers are nothing but a shorthand way of referring to the (cardinal) number of terms a certain series contains up to some given term."
• "When an agent's preferences are complete and transitive and satisfy a further continuity condition, then they can be represented by a so-called ordinal utility function."