<P> The general rule is that: a (for 1 and 2) or: e (for all other numbers, except 101: a, 42: a, et cetera, but including 11: e and 12: e) is appended to the numeral . The reason is that - a and - e respectively end the ordinal number words . The ordinals for 1 and 2 may however be given an - e form (förste and andre instead of första and andra) when used about a male person (masculine natural gender), and if so they are written 1: e and 2: e . When indicating dates, suffixes are never used . Examples: 1: a klass (first grade (in elementary school)), 3: e utgåvan (third edition), but 6 november . Furthermore, suffixes can be left out if the number obviously is an ordinal number, example: 3 utg . (3rd ed). Using a full stop as an ordinal indicator is considered archaic, but still occurs in military contexts . Example: 5 . komp (5th company). </P> <P> In Basque, Bosnian / Croatian / Serbian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Faroese, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Latvian, Norwegian, Polish, Slovak, Slovene, Turkish, among other languages, a period or full stop is written after the numeral . </P> <P> The same usage, apparently borrowed from German, is now a standard in Polish, where it replaced the superscript of the last phoneme (following complex declension and gender patterns, e.g. 1, 7, 24, 100). </P> <P> Numbers in Malay and Indonesian are preceded by the ordinal prefix ke -; for example, ke - 7, "seventh". The exception is pertama which means "first". </P>

What do you call the st in 1st