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Alphabetical order was first used in the 1st millennium BCE by Northwest Semitic scribes using the abjad system. [1] 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. [2]
The lexicographical order on the set of all these finite words orders the words as follows: Given two different words of the same length, say a = a 1 a 2...a k and b = b 1 b 2...b k, the order of the two words depends on the alphabetic order of the symbols in the first place i where the two words differ (counting from the beginning of the words ...
Alphabets usually have a standard ordering for their letters. This makes alphabets a useful tool in collation, as words can be listed in a well-defined order—commonly known as alphabetical order. This also means that letters may be used as a method of "numbering" ordered items.
The California Job Case was a compartmentalized box for printing in the 19th century, sizes corresponding to the commonality of letters. The frequency of letters in text has been studied for use in cryptanalysis, and frequency analysis in particular, dating back to the Arab mathematician al-Kindi (c. 801–873 AD), who formally developed the method (the ciphers breakable by this technique go ...
The word alphabet is a compound of alpha and beta, the names of the first two letters in the Greek alphabet. Old English was first written down using the Latin alphabet during the 7th century. During the centuries that followed, various letters entered or fell out of use. By the 16th century, the present set of 26 letters had largely stabilised:
An early non-alphabetical list of 8000 English words was the Elementarie, created by Richard Mulcaster in 1582. [23] [24] The first purely English alphabetical dictionary was A Table Alphabeticall, written by English schoolteacher Robert Cawdrey in 1604. [2] [3] The only surviving copy is found at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. This dictionary ...
Similarly to how phonemes are combined to form spoken words, letters may be combined to form written words. A single phoneme may also be represented by multiple letters in sequence, collectively called a multigraph. Multigraphs include digraphs of two letters [2] (e.g. English ch, sh, th), and trigraphs of three letters (e.g. English tch).
To arrange two Chinese characters into basic alphabetical order, [5] first compare the first letters of the pinyin letter strings of the two characters. If they are different, arrange the characters according to the letters' order in the alphabet (for example, 李 (lǐ) comes before 張 (zhāng), because the initial letter l is before initial letter z in the alphabet); if the first letters are ...