Resources
Cardinal/Ordinal Numbers
Cardinal Rules
By Evan Jenkins
A Little League team's players, the article said, "picked up their third World Series victory in as many days."
There’s a common affectation there, and it doesn’t track. As many as what? As many as third? No, obviously. “Third” is an ordinal number, denoting the position of something in a sequence. “As many as” needs to refer to a quantity, not a position, and that requires a cardinal number — here, “three.” If the sentence had said “picked up three World Series victories in as many days,” that would have been fine. (But for all that, “as many as” smacks a little of elegant variation. What’s wrong with “their third World Series victory in three days”?)
CJR
