Ordinal Numbers in German: The Endings Nobody Warns You About

To build ordinal numbers in german you add -te to the number up to 19, and -ste from 20 upwards: vier becomes vierte, zwanzig becomes zwanzigste. Three are irregular — erste, dritte and siebte — and that is the entire formation rule.

Which is why this is a strange topic to teach as vocabulary. You can learn the list in ten minutes and still get every sentence wrong, because an ordinal in German is an adjective, and adjectives take endings. The list is not the hard part. The letter that gets glued onto the end of it is.

The rule, and the three words that ignore it

Numbers 1 to 19 take -te. Numbers from 20 up take -ste. There is no third pattern and no regional variation to worry about, so once you have those two endings you can build any ordinal you will ever need, including hundertste and tausendste.

The exceptions are worth memorising outright because they are the ones you say daily. eins becomes erste, not einte. drei becomes dritte, not dreite. sieben drops its -en and becomes siebte. acht keeps its single t and becomes achte, which looks like a typo and is not. Tap any ordinal below to hear it.

If the cardinal numbers underneath are still shaky, fix those first — our guide to German numbers and the counting system covers the counting system, and numbers one to twenty covers the range you will build most of these from.

The ending is the actual work

Look at the third column of that table again. Every entry ends in -n, and none of the dictionary forms do. That is not a quirk of dates. German ordinals are adjectives, so they decline like adjectives, and the ending shifts with case, gender and the article in front of them.

Same word, same date, two different endings, and the only thing that changed is that am forces the dative. This is the single most useful thing to understand about the topic, and it is also the reason a memorised list collapses the moment you put it in a sentence.

zweites with -s after mein, dritte with -e after die. If those endings look arbitrary, they are not — they follow the same table every German adjective follows, which we work through in our guide to German cases. The practical shortcut while you are learning: after am, im or beim, the ordinal ends in -n. That one habit covers most of what a beginner says out loud.

Ordinal numbers in German dates look like full stops

Germans write ordinals as a figure plus a period: 1., 2., 3. So a date comes out as 5. Mai or 5.5., and English speakers read that period as the end of a sentence for about a week. It is not punctuation. It is the ordinal marker, and it is doing the same job as the th in 5th.

Written 12., said zwölften. The figure gives you no help with the spoken form, which is why dates are where most people discover they do not actually know this topic. Day comes before month, always, so 5.6. is the fifth of June and never the sixth of May. Our piece on reading and writing dates in German has the months and the full written conventions.

Three places learners trip

Asking what the date is

The natural English question translates badly. German asks it with an ordinal built into the question word, and there are two common forms depending on the case you need.

Floors, which are counted differently

im dritten Stock is not the third floor you were picturing. German counts the ground floor as Erdgeschoss and starts numbering above it, so the third Stock is the fourth level of the building. The ordinal is behaving perfectly; the building is not.

The ones that are not really ordinals

zum ersten Mal, zum zweiten Mal and so on are fixed expressions you will say constantly, and the ending never changes no matter what follows. Learn them as single units rather than assembling them each time, the same way you learned how do you do rather than parsing it.

Quick answers

Do I need to spell them out in writing?

Almost never. Figures with a period are standard in letters, forms and messages. Spelled-out forms appear in formal or legal text and in sentences where the number is part of a name, like Friedrich der Große's century-mates — Karl der Fünfte. For everyday writing, 3. is correct and normal.

What about 1st, 2nd, 3rd as superscript?

German does not use the raised th or st that English does. No superscript, no ordinal indicator, just the figure and the period. Writing 3rd Mai marks you immediately.

How far up do I actually need to know these?

Thirty-one, because dates stop there. Everything beyond that is formation rules you already have — hundertste, tausendste — and you will look them up on the rare occasion you need one. German ordinal numbers above about 31 are a reading skill, not a speaking one.