Microsoft Word’s AutoFormat engine contains a massive library of grammar rules designed to instantly rewrite your text. One of the most common—and occasionally frustrating—rules involves “ordinals.” If you type the number “1” followed by the letters “st” (1st) and press the spacebar, Word will instantly intercept your typing, shrink the “st”, and throw it up into the air as a superscript.
While this looks elegant in formal essays and historical documents, it can be highly disruptive in other contexts. If you are writing a technical manual, filling out a rigid legal form, or preparing data that will eventually be copied into a strict database or Excel spreadsheet, the superscript formatting will break the text alignment and cause data validation errors when exported.
You can dive into Word’s AutoFormat options to disable the ordinal rule, forcing the software to leave your numbers and letters exactly as you typed them on the baseline.
How to Stop Word from Formatting Ordinals
You must turn off the specific ordinal trigger within the AutoFormat settings.
- Open your document in Microsoft Word.
- Click on File in the top-left corner of the ribbon.
- Click on Options at the bottom of the left sidebar.
- In the Word Options window, select Proofing from the left-hand navigation pane.
- Click the AutoCorrect Options… button in the main pane.
- A new dialog box will open. Click on the tab labeled AutoFormat As You Type.
- Look under the first section labeled “Replace as you type.”
- Locate the checkbox labeled Ordinals (1st) with superscript.
- Uncheck this box.
- Click OK twice to close both windows and save your changes.
Microsoft Word will immediately stop hijacking your numbers. The next time you type “1st”, “2nd”, or “3rd” and press the spacebar, the letters will remain exactly on the same horizontal plane as the numbers, preserving your strict formatting requirements.