Alphabetical order

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.

In the Book of Jeremiah, the prophet utilizes the Atbash substitution cipher, based on alphabetical order.

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.

[2] In the 1st century BC, Roman writer Varro compiled alphabetic lists of authors and titles.

[5] 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.

[7] The 10th century saw major alphabetical lexicons of Greek (the Suda), Arabic (Ibn Faris's al-Mujmal fī al-Lugha), and Biblical Hebrew (Menahem ben Saruq's Mahberet).

Alphabetical order as an aid to consultation flourished in 11th-century Italy, which contributed works on Latin (Papias's Elementarium) and Talmudic Aramaic (Nathan ben Jehiel's Arukh).

[a] In the second half of the 12th century, Christian preachers adopted alphabetical tools to 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.

[9] Although as late as 1803 Samuel Taylor Coleridge condemned encyclopedias with "an arrangement determined by the accident of initial letters",[10] many lists are today based on this principle.

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".

All three alphabetization methods are fairly easy to create by algorithm, but many programs rely on simple lexicographic ordering instead.

Since the advent of computer-sorted lists, this type of alphabetization is less frequently encountered, though it is still used in British telephone directories.

Special rules may need to be adopted to sort strings which vary only by whether two letters are joined by a ligature.

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.

[16] 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.