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Alphabetical order is a system whereby strings of characters 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. To determine which of two strings comes first in alphabetical order, their first letters are compared. If they differ, then the string whose first letter comes earlier in the alphabet is the one which comes first in alphabetical order. 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, though 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 the strings beginning with the same letter are grouped together; and 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.〔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, p. 11-52〕 The first effective use of alphabetical order as a cataloging device among scholars may have been in ancient Alexandria.〔Daly, Lloyd. ''Contributions to the History of Alphabetization in Antiquity and the Middle Ages'' Brussels, 1967. p. 25〕 In the 1st century BCE, 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. In the 14th century, the author of the ''Fons memorabilium universi'' used a classification, but used alphabetical order within some of the books. 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. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「alphabetical order」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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