You might find this way used in phone books or similar.Īnother option would be to regard the apostrophe as ranking before the letters like a blank space and so "O'Brian" would come before "OBrian". Therefore "OBrian" would rank exactly the same as O'Brian. The more common one seems to be in index the word as if the apostrophe was not there.
#Alphabet abbreviations for words how to#
How to alphabetize a name with an apostrophe.These situations relate to the roles of the apostrophe, abbreviation, and accented characters in capitalizing names of people. Names are alphabetized according to some of the standard lexical rules that we've talked about.īut three situations occur in people's names that deserve specific consideration. In summary, the key rule to remember is that capitals have extra weight and will come first in alphabetically competing situations and that shorter is also a factor here specifically - and in general circumstances when organizing things in alphabetical order.ĭeal with punctuation by either ignoring them when ranking or ranking the punctuation marks as higher in the sort order than the other letters - give them a similar ranking to a blank space. I would treat periods as generally taken precedence over all the letters but another perfectly valid school of thought for alphabetizing word lists like this is too ignore the periods and alphabetize the list as if they were not there. So our ever-growing example for capital words in alphabetical order now looks like this: In this case, in weighting "A.P." vs "AP", we come to the conclusion that "A.P." will come first as the period in the second character spot will take precedence over any A-Z letter.
Where would an item like that be placed in our alphabetically organized list? Imagine a company that has periods in its name like "A.P." for example. Let's add yet one more similar capitalized item to our increasingly complicated little list and find out where it should be sorted. It's not in uppercase at all and so it must go after the near duplicate "App" and it's shorter than the next word "Apple" so it must go before that word, consequently, our list now looks like this: What if we wanted to add the word "app" to this list - as in an app on your phone. Ok, let's add one more word to the madness here. This company would place first in the list because it's capitalized and shorter than the rest of the items. Let's imagine that we added another company whose name was all caps like AP. So our word list would now look like this: In this case, the shorter word would take precedence and come first. This shorter name is identical to the start of the other company's name. Now, what if we had another company with a shorter name like App for example. If there are two identical words and one of them is capitalized then the capitalized word goes first in the alphabetical order like so:Īs we can see from the example above the company (Apple) comes before the fruit (apple) in any alphabetical list. Let's go over some examples to make this clearer. The primary rule in standard dictionary order is that capital letters come before lower case letters. report this ad How to Alphabetize Words with Capitals
#Alphabet abbreviations for words free#
If you're looking for a quick method to alphabetize a list of words or lines of text online then check out my free tool for alphabetizing text. If you're in a hurry, I have a very short summary of the rules of alphabetical order that should answer a lot of your questions about the basic rules alphabetizing. In this general overview, I'm going to try to talk about all the little minefields you might typically encounter when trying to figure out how to alphabetize words in a group of items or lines. The Rules of Alphabetical OrderĪside from knowing the basic ABC order of the alphabet, I'm going to talk about a few of the important rules you need to know. These are just general rules, some academic and news organizations may follow specific alphabetization styles that deviate from these rules so keep that in mind depending on your circumstances. For example, the Federal Bureau of Investigations is shortened to FBI, but you say it as “eff-bee-eye,” not “fbi.I'm going to go over some general rules for alphabetizing in case you need to manually put a bunch of words in alphabetical order. An initialism is an abbreviation that uses the first letter of each word in the phrase it’s describing (like an acronym), but you still say each letter of the initialism individually (unlike an acronym). There is a bit of debate about whether initialisms are acronyms or if acronyms and initialisms are both just types of abbreviations.
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