XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference, 4th Edition (208 page)

The
ordinal
attribute allows you to request
ordinal numbers
rather than
cardinal numbers
. For example, with a formatting token of
1
and language set (explicitly or by default) to
en
(English), the value
ordinal=“yes”
would produce
1st
,
2nd
,
3rd
,
4th
. With the formatting token
Ww
, it would produce
First
,
Second
,
Third
,
Fourth
. For
languages other than English
, the correct form of an ordinal number often depends on the noun it is qualifying. In the case of languages where this is simply done by changing the ending, the specification says that the value of the
ordinal
attribute should be the required ending, for example
ordinal=“-e”