LANGUAGE CORNER
Cardinal/Ordinal Numbers
Cardinal Rules
A Little League team's players, the article said, "picked up their third World Series victory in as many days." There's an extremely common error there. 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, Nov./Dec. 1998
