Ordinal numbers

Ordinals run your daily life in Brazil — finding a friend on the quinto andar (fifth floor), ordering minha primeira cerveja (my first beer), or hunting down an address on the Segunda Avenida. Get the gender wrong and you sound a little off; call someone's primeira esposa (first wife) when she's very much the current one, and you sound a lot worse! For floors, you can use a cardinal after the noun — andar quinze — or an ordinal before it — décimo quinto andar. Both are correct.

The First Ten

These are the ordinals Brazilians use every day:

Floors & addresses

• "Moro no quinto andar." (I live on the fifth floor.)

• "O escritório fica no terceiro andar." (The office is on the third floor.)

• "A segunda porta é a cozinha." (The second door is the kitchen.)

• "No 11º andar, a gente fala andar onze." (For the 11th floor, one expression is "floor eleven.")

Ranking & competition

• "O Brasil está em primeiro lugar!" (Brazil is in first place!)

• "Ela é a terceira da fila." (She's third in line.)

• "Ficamos em segundo lugar." (We're in second place.)

Everyday life

Térreo: the floor that isn't "first"

In Brazil the ground floor is the térreo, not the primeiro andar. So the primeiro andar is already one flight up. A few newer buildings number the ground floor as 1º, so when it matters, just ask: "O térreo é o primeiro andar?"

"segundo" has three lives

The same word means three different things — context decides:

• segundo lugar = second place (ordinal)

• um segundo = a second of time (noun)

• segundo o João = according to João (preposition)

Centuries & monarchs: numbers after the name

After a century label or the name of a monarch or pope, the convention is ordinal up to 10 and cardinal above 10:

• "século vinte e um" (the 21st century); before the noun, "vigésimo primeiro século" is also correct

Here's a secret you already half-know: Portuguese names its weekdays from Monday to Friday by their position in the week. Segunda-feira (Monday) is literally the "2nd feira," terça-feira the "3rd," on through sexta-feira (Friday) — everyday ordinals hiding in plain sight (terça is just an older form of terceira). The feira part comes from the Latin feria ("holiday"): early Christians numbered the days relative to Sunday — feria secunda, feria tertia — and the pattern also survives in parts of Galicia.

Sources: Ciberdúvidas da Língua Portuguesa, Ciberdúvidas — Ainda a origem dos dias da semana, Real Academia Galega — feira