A question about the names of English ordinal numbers?

Question

My question is in english, ordinal numbers after three have the marker or suffix of -th. Why do the first three numbers not follow this rule? Is there an explanation for it? Anybody knows? thanks for the help.

first, second, third, fourth, fifith,....hunderdth,...

Answer 1

I really do not know the reason, but the reason culd be as under.



In most competitions, there is the importance of the first three rankers. It is possible that the words, first, second and third were coined for the first three winners. One having rank four was never recognized for prize distribution. So no special word was coined for rank 4 and so on. Then the words to denote them in English were fourth, fifth and so on.



Moreover, first, second and third are more catchy as compared to oneth, twoth and threeth.

Answer 2

Actually, any number ending in 1, 2 or 3 except for 11, 12, and 13 do not follow the rule either. For example, we say "fifty-first", "fifty-second" and "fifty-third".



I think it's because English has so many different influences from other languages, and the names of "first", "second" and "third" just had different origins. "Second" comes from the Latin "secundus", whereas "one" and "two" have the same origins as the German words for one and two, "eins" and "zwei".



If you think about it, we do have other words that describe ordinal position or number without using the names "one, two, three, four..." or "first, second, third, fourth...". We can talk about a first place politician as "PRIMARY candidate". We can talk about two objects by saying "BOTH of them". After we get past 2 objects though, we start grouping them together less distinctly. I'm guessing that this has a relation to why words like "first" and "second" are used instead of "oneth" and "twoth". At least "third" has some more letters in common with the word "three"!



A lot of the other number names in English match with German in odd places, which is also why we get eleven ("elf") and twelve ("zwölf") instead of "oneteen" and "twoteen".

Answer 3

It's just a matter of the English name for the term. Everything after the first three number have the suffix -th. That's just how we call it. It's the sixty-fifth term, or the hundredth term, or the thousandth.



The number 1, 2, and 3 are special, because they're not called one-th, two-th and three-th, but first, second and third.



In fact, any number that ends in these numbers (with the exception of the -teens) should be suffixed with -st/-nd/-rd. For instance, it's 101st (hundred and first) and 102nd (hundred and second).

Answer 4

This is likely because the first three were in common use before an organized naming pattern was developed. Also, there are different source language groups. Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate gives these etymologies:



first: Middle English, from Old English fyrst; akin to Old High German furist first, Old English faran to go



second: Middle English, from Anglo-French secund, from Latin secundus second, following, favorable, from sequi to follow



third: Middle English thridde, thirde, from Old English thridda, thirdda; akin to Latin tertius third, Greek tritos, treis three

Answer 5

first origin: bef. 1000; ME; OE fyr(e)st (see fore 1 , -est ); c. G Fürst prince



second origin: 1250–1300; ME (adj., n. and adv.) < OF (adj.) < L secundus following, next, second, equiv. to sec- (base of sequÄ« to follow) + -undus adj. suffix



third origin: bef. 900; ME thirde, OE (north) thirda, var. of thridda; c. D derde, G dritte, ON thrithi, Goth thridja, Gk trítos, L tertius, Skt tṛtīya.



fourth origin: bef. 950; ME fourthe, OE fēowertha.



It's just the origins from various (Middle English, Old English, Latin)