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I'm looking for a concise way to say some thing like

The item that was submitted for first|second|third|...

The best I could come up with was

The first|second|third|... submitted item

I guess it's short enough, but I'm not sure it feels natural.

Note that the items are submitted in a batch, but in an ordered fashion.
Also, "first|second|third" are alternatives.

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  • The question here is: is there a number of times something had to be submitted or not? "The item first submitted was wrong." "The item subsequently submitted was right". "The item submitted the second or third time around was wrong."
    – Lambie
    Commented Nov 26, 2017 at 15:10
  • @Lambie No, the items are submitted at the same time. I edited the question to reflect this.
    – Karl S.
    Commented Nov 26, 2017 at 15:19
  • Ahhhhh. "Submitted item numbers 1, 2 and 3 are in the list." OR "Items numbers 1, 2 and 3 were submitted in the batch". first, second and third is probably wrong here for your purpose.
    – Lambie
    Commented Nov 26, 2017 at 15:24
  • You could, but why not "The item submitted first|second|third|..."?
    – user3169
    Commented Nov 26, 2017 at 19:56
  • I don't know whether you are proposing to use "first|second|third" in your resulting sentence, or whether you are presenting them as alternatives now, to be instantiated in the resulting sentence. If the former, then there is NO standard interpretation for "first|second|third".
    – Colin Fine
    Commented Nov 26, 2017 at 22:16

1 Answer 1

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If all of the items were submitted at the same time, and you simply want to identify them by a sequence number, then the clearest way to express this would be:

The first of the submitted items
The second of the submitted items
etc

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