Words always get truncated or omitted, though. It's technically UUID "version 1" (I think), but see how everybody just says "UUID 1". Teaching people to say "type" instead of "version" wouldn't do much good because most people aren't saying any word there anyway.
I'd prefer to use letters in cases like this. Letters have a much weaker association with ordering, there's no implication that the set is of infinite size, and there's no affordance for doing anything arithmetic with them except enumerating them.
For example, a plain old USB cable has an "A" and "B" ends, radiation can be alpha/beta/gamma, and power outlets can be type A, B, C, ... (it looks like they're up to "N" now). Nobody would think that a Danish "type K" plug is 9 versions improved on an American "type B" plug. It's just different.
Yeah, letters are much more used in situations where they do not denote some sort of order. They do, at least in English, but it's a much weaker association. It seems on some level we intuit that letter orders are arbitrary, whereas in some sense integers are literally nothing but their order.
I'd prefer to use letters in cases like this. Letters have a much weaker association with ordering, there's no implication that the set is of infinite size, and there's no affordance for doing anything arithmetic with them except enumerating them.
For example, a plain old USB cable has an "A" and "B" ends, radiation can be alpha/beta/gamma, and power outlets can be type A, B, C, ... (it looks like they're up to "N" now). Nobody would think that a Danish "type K" plug is 9 versions improved on an American "type B" plug. It's just different.