ordinal

having states that can be ordered.

An ordinal variable is a variable that can have three or more values, and these values have some kind of ordering. For instance, birth order is an ordinal variable. Let's leave aside twins for the moment. A person can have a birth order score of 1, 2, 3 and so on. A score of three isn't "three times as big" as a score of one. someone with a score of one might come from a very big family, but simply be the first-born child. It is meaningless to think of these numbers as amounts. The only purpose the numbers serve is to tell us the order- the position in a sequence.

Other ordinal variables are position in a race (first, second, third, etc.), or ranking of largest to smallest (such as largest city to smallest city).