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. The adoption of alphabetical order was part of the transition from the primacy of memory to that of written works.
#Alphabet abbreviations for words full
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 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. Jerome's Interpretations of Hebrew Names were alphabetized for ease of consultation. 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. In the 10th century, the author of the Suda used alphabetic order with phonetic variations.Īlphabetical 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. In the 3rd century CE, Harpocration wrote a Homeric lexicon alphabetized by all letters. 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 1st century BC, Roman writer Varro compiled alphabetic lists of authors and titles. 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. 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. Similarly, biblical authors used acrostics based on the (ordered) Hebrew alphabet. In the Book of Jeremiah, the prophet utilizes the Atbash substitution cipher, based on alphabetical order. The Bible is dated to the 6th–7th centuries BCE. 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 system thus tends to maximize the number of common initial letters between adjacent words.Īlphabetical order was first used in the 1st millennium BCE by Northwest Semitic scribes using the abjad system. 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. 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. 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.Ĭapital 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. If the first letters are the same, then the second letters are compared, and so on. If they differ, then the string whose first letter comes earlier in the alphabet comes before the other string. To determine which of two strings of characters comes first when arranging in alphabetical order, their first letters are compared. 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. In mathematics, a lexicographical order is the generalization of the alphabetical order to other data types, such as sequences of numbers or other ordered mathematical objects. For the creation of an alphabetic writing system, which in instances of Latin script is called romanization, see Romanization.Īlphabetical 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. For other uses, see Alphabetical (disambiguation). "Alphabetical" and "Alphabetization" redirect here.