What's the quickest way to write "2nd" "3rd" etc in LaTeX?

Question

If I want to use abbreviations for second, third and so on in my LaTeX documents, I am currently doing this: 2$^{nd}$ which seems unsatisfactory. Is there a macro I'm missing? I'm sure I could define one myself, and it would be fairly easy. But this looks like something that should already have been covered...

Answer 1

You should not use math, when it is normal text. Use \textsuperscript instead: 2\textsuperscript{nd}. You can also define a shortcut for this, e.g.

\newcommand{\ts}{\textsuperscript}

Then you could use 2\ts{nd} in the text.

Edit:
An even nicer solution is to load the package nth with the option super and use the \nth command:

\usepackage[super]{nth}
\nth{1}, \nth{2}, \nth{3}, \nth{4}

Answer 2

I guess the quickest and easiest solution is to simply write "2nd", "3rd", etc.

Superscripts aren't really necessary.

Answer 3

An alternative to nth package is fmtcount.

In this case the command is \ordinalnum. By default the ordinal is formatted as superscript, but this is optional, as it is also in nth:

\usepackage{fmtcount} % equivalent to \usepackage[super]{nth}
\usepackage[level]{fmtcount} % equivalent to \usepackage{nth}

But there are some advantages over nth:

1. Limited multilingual support (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Italian). For example, in a Spanish document \nth{3} is formatted incorrectly as "3th" but \ordinalnum{3} is rendered almost correctly as "3º" (see addendum).

2. Optional gender. For example \ordinalnum{3}[f] produces in Spanish the feminine ordinal "3ª" (tercera). There is also a neuter option (n). By default the gender is m (masculine).

3. Is if possible switch between raise and level versions of ordinals in the same document (I can't imagine why, but who know!) with \fmtcountsetoptions{fmtord=raise} or \fmtcountsetoptions{fmtord=level}

4. For English-only users, obviously (1) and (2) features are useless, but the ftmcount package has also many other ordinal commands, as \ordinal{counter} or \ordinalstring{counter} to print a counter as section as an ordinal ("3th") or as textual ordinal ("third") and more.

A third package, engord, also print numbers (\engordnumber{12}), counters (\engord{page}) and can switch between styles with \engordraisetrue or \engordraisefalse, but there are not multilingual or gender support.

On the other hand, for enumerated lists you can use the moreenum package with the labels \raisenth or \levelnth. A MWE:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{moreenum}
\begin{document}
\begin{enumerate}[label=\raisenth* --- ,start=1]
\item one
\item two
\item three
\end{enumerate}
\end{document}

Addendum: Ordinals in Spanish.

Although often not used, according to the RAE there must be a dot before the superscript, as in any abbreviation ended with a superscript as explained here. Then, the correct ordinal is "3.^o" (tercero) or "3.^er" (tercer) but not "3º".

In most cases one can just typing 1.º or 1.ª because is Spanish keyboards there are a key for the º ª \ symbols. However, the problem remain with numbers that can be ended by .^er (1,3,13,21,23,31,33,etc.). Moreover, in some fonts the º and ª symbols are underlined (as in the keyboard), that it is correct in Spanish, but can produce inconsistencies if one type, for example, 1º,2º,3\textsuperscript{er},4º. Another problem is that these symbols are only in lower case even using \MakeUppercase.

The babel package take care of the format of Spanish abbreviations with a superscript suffix, and thus with the spanish option one can use n\sptext{os} to obtain for example n.^os ("numbers" in plural), but moreover provide a shorthands for masculine and feminine ordinals (also in uppercase) using " which is not used in LaTeX for quotes. In this way, instead of 1\sptext{er} on can use just 1"er for example. In summary:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{bera}
\usepackage[spanish,es-noindentfirst]{babel}
\begin{document}

\subsubsection*{Lowercase}

1º, 2º, 3º ... 1ª, 2ª, 3ª \dotfill 
Keyboard input, incorrect (no dots). \\
1.º, 2.º, 3.º ... 1.ª, 2.ª, 3.ª 
\dotfill Keyboard input, correct but underlined.\\ 
1\sptext{o}, 2\sptext{o}, 3\sptext{o} ... 
1\sptext{a}, 2\sptext{a}, 3\sptext{a} 
\dotfill With Babel \verb|\sptext{}| command.\\
1"o, 2"o, 3"o ... 1"a 2"a 3"a \dotfill 
With "\ Babel shorthand.\\
1"er 2"o 3"er ... 1"a 2"a 3"a 
\dotfill Apocopate version (primer, tercer, etc.).

\subsubsection*{Upppercase}

\MakeUppercase{1.º, 2.ª, 3.\textsuperscript{er}} ...  
or ... 1.º, 2.ª, 3.\textsuperscript{ER}  
\dotfill (wrong way)\\
1"o 2"a  3"er  $\neq$ \MakeUppercase{1"o 2"a  3"er ... }  
or ...  1"O 2"A  3"ER 
\dotfill (babel way, correct)

\end{document}

Answer 4

If you are using ConTeXt MkIV, you can even imitate the automatic conversion of MS Word:

\usemodule[translate]
\translateinput[2nd][2\high{nd}]
\enableinputtranslation

\starttext
On the 2nd of November \unknown
\stoptext

This will translate all 2nd into 2\high{nd}.

Answer 5

If you're after speed when writing, this solution seems to be the quickest to type

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xspace}

\newcommand\nd{\textsuperscript{nd}\xspace}
\newcommand\rd{\textsuperscript{rd}\xspace}
\newcommand\nth{\textsuperscript{th}\xspace} %\th is taken already
\begin{document}
This is the 2\nd of December. Or the 4\nth of July. Or 3\rd place in a race.
\end{document}

The \xspace command intelligently decides whether there should be a space after the macro or not.

Answer 6

Although this question is quite old and has very good answers, I think that maybe there are other people as type-lazy as me, who might appreciate my approach.

Edit: In response to egreg's comments, I wanted to adapt my answer - but the proposed changes would mean that the answer coincides with Nathanael Farley's answer, except for the fact that I redefined \th. egreg strongly cautions about compatibility issues with actually typing þ when redefining \th - use at your own risk.

In the interest of completeness, here's my original answer, which distinguished between math mode and text:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage{xspace}
\usepackage{mathtools} % only for \binom

\let\thorn\th % so that thorn-rune \th is not lost
\renewcommand{\th}{%
    \ifmmode% math mode
        ^\mathrm{th}%
    \else%
        \textsuperscript{th}\xspace%
    \fi%
}
% similar commands for \st \nd \rd (which are unoccupied)

\begin{document}
Works both in text (5\th, {\it 2\nd}, {\bf 1\st}, {\sf 3\rd})
and math mode $\displaystyle \left(
5\th, \, \binom{n}{5}\th, \, \sum_{1\st}^{n\th}\right).$
\end{document}

This variant will always print upright letters in math mode, instead of adapting to the ambient text style. For a variant that adapts to the ambient style (e.g. italics in theorem environments, use \textsuperscript without distinguishing cases, see Nathanael Farley's answer).

I can imagine that someone might consider an exponent hidden in a macro bad form, but then, cases like n^2\nd seem far-fetched (and ugly), and I think it's obvious to anyone using LaTeX that this would need to be grouped. For powers, I guess I would prefer the inconsistency of $n^2$-th to $(n^2)\th$ anyway. These kinds of questions seem to be a hotly debated topic, see https://english.stackexchange.com/q/36512.

As a side note, I first tried to build an automatic \th which reads the previous character along the lines of How to find the previously printed character?, but managing \lastbox and the other primitives turned out to be way above my head. Also, even if this worked, writing 1\th is really not much quicker than writing 1\st (using the above), whereas the latter one is much more intuitive.

Answer 7

nth package

Example

\documentclass[a5paper]{scrartcl}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[super]{nth}

\begin{document}
    The \verb+nth+ package is my \nth{1} choice when it comes to typsettingh
    nth-stuff. It might also be my \nth{2} and \nth{3} choice.
\end{document}

Results in

Limitations

• \nth{$i$} does not work: domwass answer does

Answer 8

The easiest and most beautiful way (in my opinion) is to input the ordinals as Unicode characters:

1ˢᵗ, 2ⁿᵈ, 3ʳᵈ, 4ᵗʰ, $i$ᵗʰ, $n$ᵗʰ

renders as

(I believe that requires LuaLaTeX or XeLaTeX and a supporting font.)

Answer 9

You could also simply write out the word. 1st = first, 2nd = second, and so on. Probably better in a formal setting anyway. If this is in a figure or table then any of the above answers sound great, but in a paragraph setting there's no need to get too cute.

Answer 10

Using the amsmath package, you could to use the \text{} command in the math environment in the following way.

\usepackage{amsmath}

1$^{\text{st}}$