E.g. in School we have 5-7 or 8 hours every day (Math, History, Biology, Chemistry, English etc.).
The first hour starts at 8:00 A.M.
But every Thursday we have an hour that stars at 7:10 A.M.
In the table it will look like this (just random picture from the web):
In Czech language we call it:
nultá hodina which is something like zero-ish hour
and then 1st, 2nd and 3rd: první, druhá, třetí hodina
How is nultá hodina (the hour that is before the first hour) called in English?
And how do you write it "shortly"? As 0th ? Or somehow else?
Best Answer
You already had the answer: it’s zeroth.
I think you’ll find that -th is a modestly productive suffix in English for indicating ordinals other than first, second, and third. For example, consider the nth element in a series, or the i th and j th indices of (two-dimensional) matrix. You can even find “epsilonth” (εth) if you look hard enough.
But that one’s rare; zeroth is not. The OED defines zeroth as:
Its first citation is from the 19th century. So the two series work out to be:
In words: zeroth, first, second, third, fourth, fifth, . . . three hundred ninety-fifth, . . .
In figures: 0th, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, . . . 395th, . . .