Carbon-13 NMR spectroscopy is used to probe the orientational ordering in the smectic A phase of a chiral liquid crystal. Quantitative analyses of the chemical shifts and dipolar splittings of the aromatic carbons enable us to obtain the location of the long molecular axis of the molecular core and its molecular order parameters S-00, S-02 in the smectic A phase. The results from different NMR methods show self consistency and further demonstrate the general methodology of C-13 NMR for the determination of orientational ordering in liquid crystals. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.