We study possible Scott sentence complexities of linear orderings using two approaches. First, we investigate the effect of the Friedman–Stanley embedding on Scott sentence complexity and show that it only preserves $\Pi ^{\mathrm {in}}_{\alpha }$ complexities. We then take a more direct approach and exhibit linear orderings of all Scott sentence complexities except $\Sigma ^{\mathrm {in}}_{3}$ and $\Sigma ^{\mathrm {in}}_{\lambda +1}$ for $\lambda $ a limit ordinal. We show that the former cannot be the Scott sentence complexity of a linear (...) ordering. In the process we develop new techniques which appear to be helpful to calculate the Scott sentence complexities of structures. (shrink)