Definition of ordinal

The word "ordinal" has its roots in the Latin word "ordinalis," which means "pertaining to order" or "ranking." This Latin term came from the word "ordo," which signified "order" or "arrangement." In mathematics, statistics, and related fields, ordinal refers to a property related to rank or position rather than magnitude or size. For instance, second place in a competition, third place in a medal tally, or the birth order of siblings are all considered ordinal data. The usage of ordinal data differs from numerical data in that it does not involve numerical values, and the numerical ordering is based on ranks, not actual numbers. The term "ordinal" first appeared in English in the nineteenth century, when it was used to refer to a type of mathematical function that transforms one list into another list of the same length that keeps the ranks or orders of the elements in the original list. Since then, the concept has been adopted in diverse fields, including logic, statistics, and linguistics, where it refers to how items in a set are ranked or ordered rather than how far apart they are in absolute numbers. In summary, the origin of the word "ordinal" is from the Latin term "ordinalis," which refers to the property of being related to order or ranking, and it entered the English language in the nineteenth century to describe mathematical functions that preserve order.