Meaning
English Ordinal is what most people would do if asked to turn a word into a number: give each letter its place in the alphabet and add. A is 1, M is 13, Z is 26. Nothing in it comes from a tradition; it is the alphabet's own order, which is why gematrix.org calls it "Simple". Its interest is that it is transparent. Anyone can check a total by hand, and every other English cipher on the calculator sites is a variation on it: run backwards, multiplied, shifted, squared or reduced.
The old alphabets offered a precedent of sorts. When Agrippa set out the Greek numerals in 1533 he gave two orders: first the twenty-four letters simply counted from 1 to 24, then the numeral order of units, tens and hundreds that isopsephy uses. The Hebrew tradition has its own ordinal count, Mispar Siduri. Both count a real alphabet that was also a number system; the English Ordinal counts one that never was.
How it is counted
GEMATRIA: G 7 + E 5 + M 13 + A 1 + T 20 + R 18 + I 9 + A 1 = 74; reduced to 11, then to 2. ALPHABET: A 1 + L 12 + P 16 + H 8 + A 1 + B 2 + E 5 + T 20 = 65; reduced to 11, then to 2.
With only 26 small values, short words crowd onto the same totals: a total of 50 or 60 is shared by hundreds of English words. That is the arithmetic behind the matches the sites report, and the reason a match under this cipher tells you about the numbers rather than about the words.
Where the cipher comes from
The named cipher is a product of the English-gematria websites. When the Wayback Machine first captured gematrix.org, on 17 February 2010, it already offered this value as "Simple", beside the ordinal times six and Agrippa's table; Gematrinator, a website by January 2017, calls it "Ordinal" and opens with it. We found no earlier printed use of the name. In our chart it is one of the six core ciphers, shown with its digital root and every letter.
Correspondences
Each item with how it stands: “sourced” is in the work cited, “our construction” is EsoTerrier’s own, and “disputed” means the sources disagree.
- Names on the popular sites
- "Simple" on gematrix.org, "Ordinal" on Gematrinator sourced
- Counterpart in Hebrew
- Mispar Siduri, the 22 letters by their order our construction
- Counterpart in Greek
- The first order Agrippa gives in 1533, the 24 letters counted 1 to 24 sourced
- Ciphers built on it
- Reverse Ordinal, Ordinal x 6 (Sumerian), Offset 36, Trigonal, Squares our construction
How the schools read it
- gematrix.org
- Shows it as "Simple" beside its two other values.
- Gematrinator
- The first of its "base four" ciphers, with the reduction and the two reverses.
- Agrippa (1533)
- Counts the Greek letters in order as a first way of numbering them; gives no such count for Latin.
- EsoTerrier
- A core cipher: the total, its digital root and every letter, labelled as the alphabet position.
Claims about it
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Two words or names with the same value under this cipher are connected.
falseWhat the record shows: Equal values are what any table of this kind produces in quantity; the tradition reads them together as a way of interpreting a text.
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Totals under this cipher show that news events are planned by their numbers.
falseWhat the record shows: Fact-checkers showed in 2022 that the videos built on this and the other English ciphers always find a match. We read no events, dates or news by number.
