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What follows next in the sequence "unary, binary, ternary..."? gives a lengthy list up to 12 for the sequence "primary, secondary, tertiary, [...]". Does this naming continue forever? If so, what is the pattern?

Community
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Village
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    There is no limit to ordinal numbers, no. But unless it’s something like centennial or millennial, you’re just going to baffle people with tongue-twisters like quinquagesimal, sexagesimal, quingentensimal, and the rest. There is no reason not to use English for all these. – tchrist Oct 06 '14 at 01:24
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    The series is constructed from Latin prefixes. – SEL Oct 06 '14 at 01:34
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    See here for how to construct these. But if you start calling base64 sexagesimoquaternary, people will hate you. :) – tchrist Oct 06 '14 at 01:39
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    There's *n-ary* go figure. "Adjective (mathematics) of, or relating to, n entities (where n is an arbitrary or large number)" http://www.yourdictionary.com/n-ary See also: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/n-ary – Kris Oct 06 '14 at 05:59
  • @tchrist Disappointingly though, that doesn't answer if there's an end to the list. – Kris Oct 06 '14 at 06:03
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    If an arbitrary number of any size can be shown to have an ordinal English construction, then there is no limit. Per Kris' example, the -ary suffix means that any cardinal number can be provisioned as ordinal. Then again, ((2^1024)-3)ary vs ((2^1024)-4)ary would be relevant to whom? – SrJoven Oct 06 '14 at 11:54

1 Answers1

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The rules for forming these words are here Link (as noted above) and they are indeed based on Latin.

Glorfindel
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Hershel
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  • Well deserved upvote, but ... is there a less tenuous link? The given one goes to the wayback machine because the original link is dead, and that link references a dead link as its source. Anyone? – jimm101 Sep 25 '22 at 01:24