Alphabetical order

Alphabetical order is a system whereby character strings are placed in order based on the position of the characters in the conventional ordering of an alphabet. It is one of the methods of collation. In mathematics, a lexicographical order is the generalization of the alphabetical order to other data types, such as sequences of digits or numbers.
When applied to strings or sequences that may contain digits, numbers or more elaborate types of elements, in addition to alphabetical characters, the alphabetical order is generally called a lexicographical order.
To determine which of two strings of characters comes first when arranging in alphabetical order, their first letters 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 first (shorter) string is deemed to come first in alphabetical order.
Capital letters (upper case) 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 containing spaces, modified letters (such as those with diacritics), and non-letter characters such as marks of punctuation.
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.
History.
Alphabetical order was first used in the 1st millennium BCE by Northwest Semitic scribes using the Abjad system. However, a range of other methods of classifying and ordering material, including geographical, chronological, hierarchical and by category, were preferred over alphabetical order for centuries.
The Bible is dated to the 6th–7th centuries BCE. In the Book of Jeremiah, the prophet utilizes an Atbash substitution cipher, based on alphabetical order. Similarly, biblical authors used acrostics based on the (ordered) Hebrew alphabet.
The first effective use of alphabetical order as a cataloging device among scholars may have been in ancient Alexandria, in the Great Library of Alexandria, which was founded around 300 BCE. The poet and scholar Callimachus, who worked there, is thought to have created the world's first library catalog, known as the Pinakes, with scrolls shelved in alphabetical order of the first letter of authors' names.
In the 1st century BC, Roman writer Varro compiled alphabetic lists of authors and titles. In the 2nd century CE, Sextus Pompeius Festus wrote an encyclopedic epitome of the works of Verrius Flaccus, "De verborum significatu", with entries in alphabetic order. In the 3rd century CE, Harpocration wrote a Homeric lexicon alphabetized by all letters. In the 10th century, the author of the "Suda" used alphabetic order with phonetic variations.
Alphabetical order as an aid to consultation started to enter the mainstream of Western European intellectual life in the second half of the 12th century, when alphabetical tools were developed to help preachers analyse biblical vocabulary. This led to the compilation of alphabetical concordances of the Bible by the Dominican friars in Paris in the 13th century, under Hugh of Saint Cher. Older reference works such as St. Jerome's "Interpretations 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 as Robert Kilwardby's index to the works of St. Augustine, which helped readers access the full original text instead of depending on the compilations of excerpts which had become prominent in 12th century scholasticism. The adoption of alphabetical order was part of the transition from the primacy of memory to that of written works. The idea of ordering information by the order of the alphabet also met resistance from the compilers of encyclopaedias in 12th and 13th centuries, who were all devout churchmen. They preferred to organise their material theologically – in the order of God's creation, starting with "Deus" (meaning God).
In 1604 Robert Cawdrey had to explain in "Table Alphabeticall", the first monolingual English dictionary, "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". Although as late as 1803 Samuel Taylor Coleridge condemned encyclopedias with "an arrangement determined by the accident of initial letters", many lists are today based on this principle.
Arrangement in alphabetical order can be seen as a force for democratising access to information, as it does not require extensive prior knowledge to find what was needed.
Ordering in the Latin script.
Basic order and examples.
The standard order of the modern ISO basic Latin alphabet is:
An example of straightforward alphabetical ordering follows:
Another example:
The above words are ordered alphabetically. "As" comes before "Aster" because they begin with the same two letters and "As" has no more letters after that whereas "Aster" does. The next three words come after "Aster" because their fourth letter (the first one that differs) is "r", which comes after "e" (the fourth letter of "Aster") in the alphabet. Those words themselves are ordered based on their sixth letters ("l", "n" and "p" respectively). Then comes "At", which differs from the preceding words in the second letter ("t" comes after "s"). "Ataman" comes after "At" for the same reason that "Aster" came after "As". "Attack" follows "Ataman" based on comparison of their third letters, and "Baa" comes after all of the others because it has a different first letter.
Treatment of multiword strings.
When some of the strings being ordered consist of more than one word, i.e., they contain spaces or other separators such as hyphens, 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:
In the second approach, strings are alphabetized as if they had no spaces, giving the sequence:
The second approach is the one usually taken in dictionaries, and it is thus often called "dictionary order" by publishers. The first approach has often been used in book 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.
Special cases.
Modified letters.
In French, modified letters (such as those with diacritics) are treated the same as the base letter for alphabetical ordering purposes. For example, "rôle" comes between "rock" and "rose", as if it were written "role". However languages that use such letters systematically generally have their own ordering rules. See Language-specific conventions below.
Ordering by surname.
In most cultures where family names are written after given 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 properly. 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 difficult, and simple attempts will necessarily 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". The practice in certain fields of ordering citations 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.
"The" and other common words.
If a phrase begins with a very common word (such as "the", "a" or "an", called articles 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", although 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 instead on simple lexicographic ordering.
"Mac" prefixes.
The prefixes "M"' and "Mc" in Irish and Scottish surnames are abbreviations for "Mac", and are sometimes alphabetized as if the spelling is "Mac" in full. Thus "McKinley" might be listed before "Mackintosh" (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.
Ligatures.
Ligatures (two or more letters merged into one symbol) which are not considered distinct letters, such as Æ and Œ 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 in loanwords 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.
Treatment of numerals.
When some of the strings contain numerals (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 example "1776" would be sorted as if spelled out "seventeen seventy-six", and "24 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, as "1337" for leet or the movie "Seven" (which was stylised as "Se7en"), 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.
Language-specific conventions.
Languages which use an extended Latin alphabet generally have their own conventions for treatment of the extra letters. Also in some languages certain digraphs are treated as single letters for collation purposes. For example, the 29-letter alphabet of Spanish treats "ñ" as a basic letter following "n", and formerly treated the digraphs "ch" and "ll" as basic letters following "c" and "l", respectively. "Ch" and "ll" are still considered letters, but are now alphabetized as two-letter combinations. (The new alphabetization rule was issued by the Royal Spanish Academy in 1994.) On the other hand, the digraph "rr" follows "rqu" as expected, and did so even before the 1994 alphabetization rule.
In a few cases, such as Kiowa, the alphabet has been completely reordered.
Alphabetization rules applied in various languages are listed below.
Automation.
Collation algorithms (in combination with sorting algorithms) are used in computer programming to place strings in alphabetical order. A standard example is the Unicode Collation Algorithm, which can be used to put strings containing any Unicode symbols into (an extension of) alphabetical order. 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 in Common Locale Data Repository.
Similar orderings.
The principle behind alphabetical ordering can still be applied in languages that do not strictly speaking use an alphabet – for example, they may be written using a syllabary or abugida – provided the symbols used have an established ordering.
For logographic writing systems, such as Chinese hanzi or Japanese kanji, the method of radical-and-stroke sorting is frequently used as a way of defining an ordering on the symbols. Japanese sometimes uses pronunciation order, most commonly with the Gojūon order but sometimes with the older Iroha ordering.
In mathematics, lexicographical order is a means of ordering sequences in a manner analogous to that used to produce alphabetical order.
Some computer applications use a version of alphabetical order that can be achieved using a very simple algorithm, based purely on the ASCII or Unicode codes for characters. This may have non-standard effects such as placing all capital letters before lower-case ones. See ASCIIbetical order.
A rhyming dictionary is based on sorting words in alphabetical order starting from the last to the first letter of the word.