alphabetization

Benjamin Barrett gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM
Sun Nov 13 19:52:39 UTC 2011


Thank you for that interesting post, as always.

Alphabetization can be a pain. I use Windows on my Mac and there are some differences between the two systems. Also, I often use diacritics, which cause other problems.

For fun, I did a sort using smart and non-smart quotes. Here are the results showing where the smart quotes are:

Microsoft Word 2007 for Windows:

girl’s (smart)
girl’s (smart)
girls
girl's
girls'

Microsoft Word 2011 for Mac:

girl's
girl’s (smart)
girl’s (smart)
girls
girls'

I'm not 100% sure about the Mac results as Word gave me a "syllable" option, which I believe means "English," but I'm not sure.

In any case, here's one more point on the graph that shows how variable the answer to this problem could be.

Also, I hope the OED will take note of "nought" in the blog post, which, if I'm reading the OED entry correctly, is listed as archaic and regional.

Benjamin Barrett
Seattle, WA

On Nov 13, 2011, at 10:36 AM, Arnold Zwicky wrote:

> on my blog, with credit to ADS-Lers:
>
> http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2011/11/13/alphabetizing/
>

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