"Alphabetical" and "Alphabetization" redirect here. For other uses, seeAlphabetical (disambiguation). For the creation of an alphabetic writing system, which in instances of Latin script is called romanization, seeRomanization.
Flags of certain countries at theÉlysée Palace in Paris for a peace conference regarding Libya, 2011. The national flags (other than that of the host, France) are arranged in French alphabetical order:Allemagne,Belgique,Canada,Danemark,Émirats Arabes Unis,Espagne,États-Unis,Grèce,Irak,Italie,Jordanie,Maroc,Norvège,Pays-Bas,Pologne,Qatar,Royaume-Uni.
Alphabetical order is a system wherebycharacter strings are placed in order based on the position of the characters in the conventional ordering of analphabet. It is one of the methods ofcollation. In mathematics, alexicographical order is the generalization of the alphabetical order to other data types, such assequences of numbers or other orderedmathematical objects.
When applied to strings orsequences that may contain digits, numbers or more elaborate types of elements, in addition to alphabetical characters, the alphabetical order is generally called alexicographical order.
To determine which of two strings of characters comes first when arranging in alphabetical order, their firstletters are compared. If they differ, then the string whose first letter comes earlier in the alphabet comes before the other string. If the first letters are the same, then the second letters are compared, and so on. If a position is reached where one string has no more letters to compare while the other does, then the shorter string is deemed to come first in alphabetical order.
Capital or upper case letters are generally considered to be identical to their corresponding lower case letters for the purposes of alphabetical ordering, although conventions may be adopted to handle situations where two strings differ only in capitalization. Various conventions also exist for the handling of strings containingspaces, modified letters, such as those withdiacritics, and non-letter characters such as marks ofpunctuation.
The result of placing a set of words or strings in alphabetical order is that all of the strings beginning with the same letter are grouped together; within that grouping all words beginning with the same two-letter sequence are grouped together; and so on. The system thus tends to maximize the number of common initial letters between adjacent words.
The order of the letters of the alphabet is attested from the 14th century BC in the town ofUgarit onSyria's northern coast.[1] Tablets found there bear over one thousand cuneiform signs, but these signs are not Babylonian and there are only thirty distinct characters. About twelve of the tablets have the signs set out in alphabetic order. There are two orders found, one of which is nearly identical to the order used forHebrew,Greek andLatin, and a second order very similar to that used forGeʽez.[2]
It is not known how many letters theProto-Sinaitic alphabet had nor what their alphabetic order was. Among its descendants, theUgaritic alphabet had 27 consonants, theSouth Arabian alphabets had 29, and thePhoenician alphabet 22. These scripts were arranged in two orders, anABGDE order in Phoenician and anHLĦMQ order in the south; Ugaritic preserved both orders. Both sequences proved remarkably stable among the descendants of these scripts.
As applied to words, alphabetical order was first used in the 1st millenniumBCE by Northwest Semitic scribes using theabjad system.[3] However, a range of other methods of classifying and ordering material, including geographical,chronological,hierarchical andby category, were preferred over alphabetical order for centuries.[4]
The first effective use of alphabetical order as a cataloging device among scholars may have been in ancient Alexandria,[6] in theGreat Library of Alexandria, which was founded around 300 BCE. The poet and scholarCallimachus, who worked there, is thought to have created the world's firstlibrary catalog, known as thePinakes, with scrolls shelved in alphabetical order of the first letter of authors' names.[4]
In the second half of the 12th century,Christian preachers adopted alphabetical tools to analysebiblical vocabulary. This led to the compilation of alphabeticalconcordances of the Bible by theDominican friars inParis in the 13th century, underHugh of Saint Cher. Older reference works such asSt. Jerome'sInterpretations of Hebrew Names were alphabetized for ease of consultation. The use of alphabetical order was initially resisted by scholars, who expected their students to master their area of study according to its own rational structures; its success was driven by such tools asRobert Kilwardby's index to the works ofSt. Augustine, which helped readers access the full original text instead of depending on the compilations ofexcerpts which had become prominent in 12th centuryscholasticism. The adoption of alphabetical order was part of the transition from the primacy ofmemory to that of written works.[10] The idea of ordering information by the order of the alphabet also met resistance from the compilers of encyclopaedias in the 12th and 13th centuries, who were all devout churchmen. They preferred to organise their materialtheologically – in the order of God's creation, starting withDeus (meaning God).[4]
In 1604Robert Cawdrey had to explain inTable Alphabeticall, the firstmonolingual Englishdictionary, "Nowe if the word, which thou art desirous to finde, begin with (a) then looke in the beginning of this Table, but if with (v) looke towards the end".[11] Although as late as 1803Samuel Taylor Coleridge condemned encyclopedias with "an arrangement determined by the accident of initial letters",[12] many lists are today based on this principle.
The above words are ordered alphabetically.As comes beforeAster because they begin with the same two letters andAs has no more letters after that whereasAster does. The next three words come afterAster because their fourth letter (the first one that differs) isr, which comes aftere (the fourth letter ofAster) in the alphabet. Those words themselves are ordered based on their sixth letters (l,n andp respectively). Then comesAt, which differs from the preceding words in the second letter (t comes afters).Ataman comes afterAt for the same reason thatAster came afterAs.Attack followsAtaman based on comparison of their third letters, andBaa comes after all of the others because it has a different first letter.
When some of the strings being ordered consist of more than one word, i.e., they containspaces or other separators such ashyphens, then two basic approaches may be taken. In the first approach, all strings are ordered initially according to their first word, as in the sequence:
Oak; Oak Hill; Oak Ridge; Oakley Park; Oakley River
where all strings beginning with the separate wordOak precede all those beginning withOakley, becauseOak precedesOakley in alphabetical order.
In the second approach, strings are alphabetized as if they had no spaces or hyphens,[b] giving the sequence:
Oak; Oak Hill; Oakley Park; Oakley River; Oak Ridge
whereOak Ridge now comes after theOakley strings, as it would if it were written "Oakridge".
The second approach is the one usually taken in dictionaries,[citation needed] and it is thus often calleddictionary order bypublishers.[c] The first approach has often been used inbook indexes, although each publisher traditionally set its own standards for which approach to use therein; there was no ISO standard for book indexes (ISO 999) before 1975.
In French, modified letters (such as those withdiacritics) are treated the same as the base letter for alphabetical ordering purposes. For example,rôle comes betweenrock androse, as if it were writtenrole. However, languages that use such letters systematically generally have their own ordering rules. See§ Language-specific conventions below.
In most cultures wherefamily names are written aftergiven names, it is still desired to sort lists of names (as in telephone directories) by family name first. In this case, names need to be reordered to be sorted correctly. For example, Juan Hernandes and Brian O'Leary should be sorted as "Hernandes, Juan" and "O'Leary, Brian" even if they are not written this way. Capturing this rule in a computer collation algorithm is complex, and simple attempts will fail. For example, unless the algorithm has at its disposal an extensive list of family names, there is no way to decide if "Gillian Lucille van der Waal" is "van der Waal, Gillian Lucille", "Waal, Gillian Lucille van der", or even "Lucille van der Waal, Gillian".
Ordering by surname is frequently encountered in academic contexts. Within a single multi-author paper, ordering the authors alphabetically by surname, rather than by other methods such as reverse seniority or subjective degree of contribution to the paper, is seen as a way of "acknowledg[ing] similar contributions" or "avoid[ing] disharmony in collaborating groups".[13] The practice in certain fields of orderingcitations in bibliographies by the surnames of their authors has been found to create bias in favour of authors with surnames which appear earlier in the alphabet, while this effect does not appear in fields in which bibliographies are ordered chronologically.[14]
If a phrase begins with a very common word (such as "the", "a" or "an", calledarticles in grammar), that word is sometimes ignored or moved to the end of the phrase, but this is not always the case. For example, the book "The Shining" might be treated as "Shining", or "Shining, The" and therefore before the book title "Summer of Sam". However, it may also be treated as simply "The Shining" and after "Summer of Sam". Similarly, "A Wrinkle in Time" might be treated as "Wrinkle in Time", "Wrinkle in Time, A", or "A Wrinkle in Time". All three alphabetization methods are fairly easy to create by algorithm, but many programs rely on simplelexicographic ordering instead.
The prefixesM andMc in Irish and Scottish surnames are abbreviations forMac and are sometimes alphabetized as if the spelling isMac in full. ThusMcKinley might be listed beforeMackintosh (as it would be if it had been spelled out as "MacKinley"). Since the advent of computer-sorted lists, this type of alphabetization is less frequently encountered, though it is still used in British telephone directories.
The prefixSt orSt. is an abbreviation of "Saint", and is traditionally alphabetized as if the spelling isSaint in full. Thus in a gazetteerSt John's might be listed beforeSalem (as if it would be if it had been spelled out as "Saint John's"). Since the advent of computer-sorted lists, this type of alphabetization is less frequently encountered, though it is still sometimes used.
Ligatures (two or more letters merged into one symbol) which are not considered distinct letters, such asÆ andŒ in English, are typically collated as if the letters were separate—"æther" and "aether" would be ordered the same relative to all other words. This is true even when the ligature is not purely stylistic, such as inloanwords and brand names.
Special rules may need to be adopted to sort strings which vary only by whether two letters are joined by a ligature.
When some of the strings containnumerals (or other non-letter characters), various approaches are possible. Sometimes such characters are treated as if they came before or after all the letters of the alphabet. Another method is for numbers to be sorted alphabetically as they would be spelled: for example1776 would be sorted as if spelled out "seventeen seventy-six", and24 heures du Mans as if spelled "vingt-quatre..." (French for "twenty-four"). When numerals or other symbols are used as special graphical forms of letters, as1337 forleet or the movieSeven (which was stylised asSe7en), they may be sorted as if they were those letters.Natural sort order orders strings alphabetically, except that multi-digit numbers are treated as a single character and ordered by the value of the number encoded by the digits.
In the case ofmonarchs andpopes, although their numbers are inRoman numerals and resemble letters, they are normally arranged in numerical order: so, for example, even though V comes after I, the Danish kingChristian IX comes after his predecessorChristian VIII.
Languages which use anextended Latin alphabet generally have their own conventions for treatment of the extra letters. Also in some languages certaindigraphs are treated as single letters for collation purposes. For example, theSpanish alphabet treatsñ as a basic letter followingn, and formerly treated the digraphsch andll as basic letters followingc andl, respectively. Nowch andll are alphabetized as two-letter combinations. The new alphabetization rule was issued by theRoyal Spanish Academy in 1994. These digraphs were still formally designated as letters but they are no longer so since 2010. On the other hand, the digraphrr followsrqu as expected (and did so even before the 1994 alphabetization rule), while vowels with acute accents (á, é, í, ó, ú) have always been ordered in parallel with their base letters, as has the letterü.
In a few cases, such asArabic andKiowa, the alphabet has been completely reordered.
Alphabetization rules applied in various languages are listed below.
InArabic, there are two main orders of the28 letter alphabet used today. The standard and most commonly used is thehijāʾī order, which was created by the early Arab linguistNasr ibn 'Asim al-Laythi and features a visual ordering method where letters are ordered based on their shapes. For examplebāʾ (ب),tāʾ (ت),thāʾ (ث) are grouped as they have the same base shape orrasm (ٮ) and are differentiated only by consonant pointing known asiʻjām. The originalʾabjadī order, which phonetically resembles that of otherSemitic languages as well as Latin, is still in use today, usually limited for ordering lists in a document, analogous toRoman Numerals. When theʾabjadī order is used in numbering, letters are written in a modified form to distinguish them from letters used in words and from numerals. For example,ʾalif (ا) which looks identical to theEastern Arabic numeral one (١), a small oval loop extends clockwise of the letter's bottom, followed by a short tail (𞺀).[citation needed] Although these characters are rarely used digitally they are encoded in Unicode underArabic Mathematical Alphabetic Symbols.[15] A less common order, theṣawtī [ar] order, is collated phonetically and was created byal-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi.
InAzerbaijani, there are eight additional letters to the standard Latin alphabet. Five of them are vowels: i, ı, ö, ü,ə and three are consonants: ç, ş, ğ. The alphabet is the same as theTurkish, with the same sounds written with the same letters, except for three additional letters: q, x and ə for sounds that do not exist in Turkish. Although all the "Turkish letters" are collated in their "normal" alphabetical order like in Turkish, the three extra letters are collated arbitrarily after letters whose sounds approach theirs. So, q is collated just after k, x (pronounced like a Germanch) is collated just after h and ə (pronounced roughly like an English shorta) is collated just after e.
InBreton, there is no "c", "q", "x" but there are the digraphs "ch" and "c'h", which are collated between "b" and "d". For example: « buzhugenn, chug, c'hoar, daeraouenn » (earthworm, juice, sister, teardrop).
InCzech andSlovak, accented vowels have secondary collating weight – compared to other letters, they are treated as their unaccented forms (in Czech, A-Á, E-É-Ě, I-Í, O-Ó, U-Ú-Ů, Y-Ý, and in Slovak, A-Á-Ä, E-É, I-Í, O-Ó-Ô, U-Ú, Y-Ý), but then they are sorted after the unaccented letters (for example, the correct lexicographic order is baa, baá, báa, báá, bab, báb, bac, bác, bač, báč [in Czech] and baa, baá, baä, báa, báá, báä, bäa, bäá, bää, bab, báb, bäb, bac, bác, bäc, bač, báč, bäč [in Slovak]). Accented consonants have primary collating weight and are collated immediately after their unaccented counterparts, with exception of Ď, Ň and Ť (in Czech) and Ď, Ĺ, Ľ, Ň, Ŕ and Ť (in Slovak), which have again secondary weight.CH is considered to be a separate letter and goes betweenH andI. In Slovak,DZ andDŽ are also considered separate letters and are positioned betweenĎ andE.
In theDanish and Norwegian alphabets, the same extra vowels as in Swedish (see below) are also present but in a different order and with differentglyphs (..., X, Y, Z,Æ,Ø,Å). Also, "Aa" collates as an equivalent to "Å". The Danish alphabet has traditionally seen "W" as a variant of "V", but today "W" is considered a separate letter.
InDutch the combination IJ (representingIJ) was formerly to be collated as Y (or sometimes as a separate letter: Y < IJ < Z), but is currently mostly collated as 2 letters (II < IJ < IK). Exceptions are phone directories; IJ is always collated as Y here because in many Dutch family names Y is used where modern spelling would require IJ. Note that a word starting with ij that is written with a capital I is also written with a capital J, for example, the townIJmuiden, the riverIJssel and the country IJsland (Iceland).
InEsperanto, consonants withcircumflex accents (ĉ,ĝ,ĥ,ĵ,ŝ), as well asŭ (u withbreve), are counted as separate letters and collated separately (c, ĉ, d, e, f, g, ĝ, h, ĥ, i, j, ĵ ... s, ŝ, t, u, ŭ, v, z).
InEstonianõ,ä,ö andü are considered separate letters and collate afterw. Lettersš,z andž appear in loanwords and foreign proper names only and follow the letters in theEstonian alphabet, which otherwise does not differ from the basic Latin alphabet.
TheFaroese alphabet also has some of the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish extra letters, namelyÆ andØ. Furthermore, theFaroese alphabet uses the Icelandic eth, which follows theD. Five of the six vowelsA,I,O,U andY can get accents and are after that considered separate letters. The consonantsC,Q,X,W andZ are not found. Therefore, the first five letters areA,Á,B,D andÐ, and the last five areV,Y,Ý,Æ,Ø
InFilipino (Tagalog) and other Philippine languages, the letter Ng is treated as a separate letter. It is pronounced as insing,ping-pong, etc. By itself, it is pronouncednang, but in generalFilipino orthography, it is spelled as if it were two separate letters (n and g). Also, letter derivatives (such asÑ) immediately follow the base letter. Filipino also is written with diacritics, but their use is very rare (except thetilde).
TheFinnish alphabet and collating rules are the same as those of Swedish.
ForFrench, thelast accent in a given word determines the order.[16] For example, in French, the following four words would be sorted this way: cote < côte < coté < côté. The letter e is ordered as e é è ê ë (œ considered as oe), same thing for o as ô ö.
InGerman letters withumlaut (Ä,Ö,Ü) are treated generally just like their non-umlauted versions;ß is always sorted as ss. This makes the alphabetic order Arbeit, Arg, Ärgerlich, Argument, Arm, Assistent, Aßlar, Assoziation. For phone directories and similar lists of names, the umlauts are to be collated like the letter combinations "ae", "oe", "ue" because a number of German surnames appear both with umlaut and in the non-umlauted form with "e" (Müller/Mueller). This makes the alphabetic order Udet, Übelacker, Uell, Ülle, Ueve, Üxküll, Uffenbach.
TheHungarian vowels have accents, umlauts, and double accents, while consonants are written with single, double (digraphs) or triple (trigraph) characters. In collating, accented vowels are equivalent with their non-accented counterparts and double and triple characters follow their single originals. Hungarian alphabetic order is: A=Á, B, C, Cs, D, Dz, Dzs, E=É, F, G, Gy, H, I=Í, J, K, L, Ly, M, N, Ny, O=Ó, Ö=Ő, P, Q, R, S, Sz, T, Ty, U=Ú, Ü=Ű, V, W, X, Y, Z, Zs. (Before 1984,dz anddzs were not considered single letters for collation, but two letters each, d+z and d+zs instead.) It means that e.g.nádcukor should precedenádcsomó (even thoughs normally precedesu), sincec precedescs in the collation. Difference in vowel length should only be taken into consideration if the two words are otherwise identical (e.g.egér, éger). Spaces and hyphens within phrases are ignored in collation.Ch also occurs as a digraph in certain words but it is not considered as a grapheme on its own right in terms of collation.
A particular feature of Hungarian collation is that contracted forms of double di- and trigraphs (such asggy fromgy + gy orddzs fromdzs + dzs) should be collated as if they were written in full (independently of the fact of the contraction and the elements of the di- or trigraphs). For example,kaszinó should precedekassza (even though the fourth characterz would normally come afters in the alphabet), because the fourth "character" (grapheme) of the wordkassza is considered a secondsz (decomposingssz intosz + sz), which does followi (inkaszinó).
InIcelandic,Þ is added, and D is followed byÐ. Each vowel (A, E, I, O, U, Y) is followed by its correspondent withacute: Á, É, Í, Ó, Ú, Ý. There is no Z, so the alphabet ends: ... X, Y, Ý,Þ,Æ, Ö.
Both letters were also used byAnglo-Saxon scribes who also used the Runic letterWynn to represent /w/.
Þ (called thorn; lowercase þ) is also a Runic letter.
Ð (called eth; lowercase ð) is the letterD with an added stroke.
Kiowa is ordered on phonetic principles, like theBrahmic scripts, rather than on the historical Latin order. Vowels come first, then stop consonants ordered from the front to the back of the mouth, and from negative to positivevoice-onset time, then the affricates, fricatives, liquids, and nasals:
A, AU, E, I, O, U, B, F, P, V, D, J, T, TH, G, C, K, Q, CH, X, S, Z, L, Y, W, H, M, N
InLithuanian, specifically Lithuanian letters go after their Latin originals. Another change is thatY comes just beforeJ: ... G, H, I, Į, Y, J, K...
InMaltese alphabet the digraphs GĦ and IE are treated as single letters, and each is listed after the first character of the pair. The dotted letters (Ċ Ġ Ż) are collated before their originals, while Ħ is after H. Accents, apostrophes and hyphens are ignored. However, when two words sort identically these diacritics are taken into consideration, such that accented letters follow non-accented.
InPolish, specifically Polish letters derived from the Latin alphabet are collated after their originals: A, Ą, B, C, Ć, D, E, Ę, ..., L, Ł, M, N, Ń, O, Ó, P, ..., S, Ś, T, ..., Z, Ź, Ż. The digraphs for collation purposes are treated as if they were two separate letters.
InPinyin alphabetical order, where words have the same basic letters in pinyin and differ only in modifying diacritics, the unmodified letter comes before the modified letter. For example,⟨e⟩ comes before⟨ê⟩ (額 (è) before 欸 (ê̄)), and⟨u⟩ comes before and⟨ü⟩ (路 (lù) before 驢 (lǘ) and 努 (nǔ) before 女 (nǚ)). Characters with the same pinyin letters (including modified letters⟨ê⟩ and⟨ü⟩) are arranged according to their tones in the order of "first tone (i.e., "flat tone"), second tone (rising tone), third tone (falling-rising tone), fourth tone (falling tone), fifth tone (neutral tone)", for example "媽 (mā), 麻 (má), 馬 (mǎ), 罵 (mà), 嗎 (ma)".[d]
InPortuguese, the collating order is just like in English: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z. Digraphs and letters with diacritics are not included in the alphabet.
InRomanian, special characters derived from the Latin alphabet are collated after their originals: A, Ă, Â, ..., I, Î, ..., S, Ș, T, Ț, ..., Z.
InSerbo-Croatian and other related South Slavic languages, the five accented characters and three conjoined characters are sorted after the originals: ..., C, Č, Ć, D, DŽ, Đ, E, ..., L, LJ, M, N, NJ, O, ..., S, Š, T, ..., Z, Ž.
Spanish treated (until 1994) "CH" and "LL" as single letters, giving an ordering ofcinco,credo,chispa andlomo,luz,llama. This is not true any more since in 1994 theRAE adopted the more conventional usage, and now LL is collated between LK and LM, and CH between CG and CI. The six characters with diacritics Á, É, Í, Ó, Ú, Ü are treated as the original letters A, E, I, O, U, for example:radio,ráfaga,rana,rápido,rastrillo. The only Spanish-specific collating question isÑ (eñe) as a different letter collated after N.
In theSwedish alphabet, there are three extravowels placed at its end (..., X, Y, Z,Å,Ä,Ö), similar to the Danish and Norwegian alphabet, but with different glyphs and a different collating order. The letter "W" has been treated as a variant of "V", but in the 13th edition ofSvenska Akademiens ordlista (2006) "W" was considered a separate letter.
In theTurkish alphabet there are six additional letters: ç, ğ, ı, ö, ş, and ü (but no q, w, and x). They are collated with ç after c, ğ after g, ıbefore i, ö after o, ş after s, and ü after u. Originally, when the alphabet was introduced in 1928, ı was collated after i, but the order was changed later so that letters having shapes containing dots, cedilles or other adorning marks always follow the letters with corresponding bare shapes. Note that in Turkish orthography the letter I is the majuscule of dotless ı, whereas İ is the majuscule of dotted i.
In manyTurkic languages (such asAzeri or theJaꞑalif orthography forTatar), there used to be the letterGha (Ƣƣ), which came betweenG andH. It is now in disuse.
InVietnamese, there are seven additional letters:ă,â,đ,ê,ô,ơ,ư whilef,j,w,z are absent, even though they are still in some use (like Internet address, foreign loan language). "f" is replaced by the combination "ph". The same as for "w" is "qu".
InVolapükä,ö andü are counted as separate letters and collated separately (a, ä, b ... o, ö, p ... u, ü, v) whileq andw are absent.[17]
InWelsh the digraphs CH, DD, FF, NG, LL, PH, RH, and TH are treated as single letters, and each is listed after the first character of the pair (except for NG which is listed after G), producing the order A, B, C, CH, D, DD, E, F, FF, G, NG, H, and so on. It can sometimes happen, however, that word compounding results in the juxtaposition of two letters which donot form a digraph. An example is the word LLONGYFARCH (composed from LLON + GYFARCH). This results in such an ordering as, for example, LAWR, LWCUS, LLONG, LLOM, LLONGYFARCH (NG is a digraph in LLONG, but not in LLONGYFARCH). The letter combination R+H (as distinct from the digraph RH) may similarly arise by juxtaposition in compounds, although this tends not to produce any pairs in which misidentification could affect the ordering. For the other potentially confusing letter combinations that may occur – namely, D+D and L+L – a hyphen is used in the spelling (e.g. AD-DAL, CHWIL-LYS).
Collation algorithms (in combination withsorting algorithms) are used in computer programming to place strings in alphabetical order. A standard example is theUnicode Collation Algorithm, which can be used to put strings containing anyUnicode symbols into (an extension of) alphabetical order.[16] It can be made to conform to most of the language-specific conventions described above by tailoring its default collation table. Several such tailorings are collected inCommon Locale Data Repository.
The principle behind alphabetical ordering can still be applied in languages that do not strictly speaking use analphabet – for example, they may be written using asyllabary orabugida – provided the symbols used have an established ordering.
Forlogographic writing systems, such as Chinesehanzi or Japanesekanji, the method ofradical-and-stroke sorting is frequently used as a way of defining an ordering on the symbols. Japanese sometimes uses pronunciation order, most commonly with theGojūon order but sometimes with the olderIroha ordering.
In mathematics,lexicographical order is a means of ordering sequences in a manner analogous to that used to produce alphabetical order.[18]
Some computer applications use a version of alphabetical order that can be achieved using a very simplealgorithm, based purely on theASCII orUnicode codes for characters. This may have non-standard effects such as placing all capital letters before lower-case ones. SeeASCIIbetical order.
Arhyming dictionary is based on sorting words in alphabetical order starting from the last to the first letter of the word.
^Nathan'sArukh may not have been the first alphabetical Talmudic dictionary, but it achieved surpassing popularity and remains in use today. One possible antecedent is the lostAlpha-Beta ofMachir ben Yehuda [he].
^In MS Explorer's case, the space, the apostrophe (U+0027), and all of the hyphen-like characters (U+002D and U+2010 through U+2014, inclusive) are omitted from the primary sort key.
^For instance, theHarrap's Shorter Dictionnaire Anglais-Français/ Français-Anglais, ISBN 0-245-60660-2, page 640, has the orderingoil, oil-bearing, oilcan, oilcloth, oil-cooled, oiled[…] oiliness, oil lamp, oil paint, oil painting, oilpaper.
^ There is an exception: InABC Chinese–English Dictionary the tone order is "zero tone (neutral tone), first tone (flat tone), second tone (rising tone), third tone (falling-rising tone) and fourth tone (falling tone)".
^Reinhard G. Lehmann: "27-30-22-26. How Many Letters Needs an Alphabet? The Case of Semitic", in:The idea of writing: Writing across borders, edited by Alex de Voogt and Joachim Friedrich Quack, Leiden: Brill 2012, pp. 11–52.
^e.g. Psalms 25, 34, 37, 111, 112, 119 and 145 of the Hebrew Bible
^Daly, Lloyd.Contributions to the History of Alphabetization in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Brussels, 1967. p. 25.
^O'Hara, James (1989). "Messapus, Cycnus, and the Alphabetical Order of Vergil's Catalogue of Italian Heroes".Phoenix.43 (1):35–38.doi:10.2307/1088539.JSTOR1088539.
^Gibson, Craig (2002).Interpreting a classic: Demosthenes and his ancient commentators.
^Rouse, Mary A.; Rouse, Richard M. (1991), "Statim invenire: Schools, Preachers and New Attitudes to the Page",Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 201–219,ISBN0-268-00622-9
^Cawdrey, Robert (1604).A Table Alphabeticall. London. p. [A4]v.
Chauvin, Yvonne.Pratique du classement alphabétique. 4th ed. Paris: Bordas, 1977.ISBN2-04-010155-1
Flanders, Judith.A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order. New York: Basic Books / Hatchette Books, 2020.ISBN978-1-5416-7507-0
