Primary, secondary, tertiary....

Factual Questions
1

What comes next?

2

quatenary? quaternary?

MechWarior had 4 pages of options, I think the 4th page was labeled like this.

Brian

3

Quaternary. I’ve also heard it used to describe the structure of DNA.

4

quaternary, quinary, senary, septenary, octonary, nonary, denary.

you want more?

5

quarternary

6

Nope. The word sought in this thread does not have an R ahead of the T. It comes from the Latin quaternius rather than the French quarte or Latin quartus.

7

In Geology/Paleontology, the “Quaternary” Period is composed of the Pleistocene and the Holocene, or Recent, Epochs (the latter being the time since the end of the Pleistocene). The “Tertiary” includes the epochs from the Paleocene to the Pliocene. Together, these two periods make up the Cenozoic Era. The terms “Primary” and “Secondary” are now obsolete.

8

[Mundane Pointless Hijacks I Must Make]
My previous hard drive had partitions named “Primary”, “Secondary”, “Tertiary”, “Quaternary”, “Quintenary” etc. It was strictly ordinal, not paleontological, but did draw some comments about “periods” and “eras”, so when I upgraded to the 60 (hey, it’s a laptop, quit smirking) and put OS X on one of them, the “Carbon” applications of OS X plus the “era” stuff inspired the new partition naming convention: “Cambrian”, “Ordovician”, “Devonian”, “Silurian”, “Pennsylvanian”, “Mississippian”, and “Permian”. OS X is on “Pennsylvanian” – one of the “Carboniferous” partitions.
[/MPHIMM]