The difference between Cardinal number and Ordinal number

When used as nouns, cardinal number means a number used to denote quantity, whereas ordinal number means a word that expresses the relative position of an item in a sequence.

check bellow for the other definitions of Cardinal number and Ordinal number

  1. Cardinal number as a noun:

    A number used to denote quantity; a counting number; a cardinal.

    Examples:

    "The smallest cardinal numbers are 0, 1, 2, and 3."

    "The cardinal number "three" can be represented as "3" or "three"."

  2. Cardinal number as a noun (mathematics):

    A generalized kind of number used to denote the size of a set, including infinite sets.

  3. Cardinal number as a noun (grammar):

    A word that expresses a countable quantity; a cardinal numeral.

    Examples:

    "Three" is a cardinal number, while "third" is an ordinal number."

  1. Ordinal number as a noun (grammar):

    A word that expresses the relative position of an item in a sequence.

    Examples:

    "First, second and third are the ordinal numbers corresponding to one, two and three."

  2. Ordinal number as a noun (arithmetic):

    A natural number used to denote position in a sequence.

    Examples:

    "In the expression a<sub>3</sub>, the "3" is an ordinal number. "

  3. Ordinal number as a noun (set theory):

    Such a number generalised to correspond to any cardinal number (the size of some set); formally, the order type of some well-ordered set of some cardinality a, which represents an equivalence class of well-ordered sets (exactly those of cardinality a) under the equivalence relation "existence of an order-preserving bijection".

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