Alphabetical sorting is a useful and effective way to arrange words, information, and objects for school, work, or personal use. Whether you're planning to sort your important documents or your large collection of records alphabetically, the alphabetical order rules can be more complicated than just understanding your ABCs. Follow these steps to sort them alphabetically properly.
Step
Part 1 of 2: Preparing Your Information to Arrange Alphabetically
Step 1. Place your information or object in an easy-to-see location
Seeing all the data that you need to sort alphabetically will help the process of sorting go faster and smoother.
- If you're organizing data on a computer, it can be helpful to create new files or folders to avoid confusion.
- If you're sorting objects alphabetically, such as records or books, remove them from where they are now so you can see their names easily.
Step 2. Create an open and accessible space, to place your information or objects in alphabetical order
Avoid clutter and confusion by creating empty spaces, where your data or objects will be as you sort them alphabetically.
Step 3. Decide if you want to sort your objects or data alphabetically by name, title, or some other system
Part 2 of 2: Organizing Your Information Alphabetically
Step 1. Place objects starting with the letter “A” in front and arrange them in alphabetical order until “Z”
Step 2. Compare the first letters in the first word
- Place two objects next to each other to determine which object has the first alphabet.
- Choose an object that is near the beginning of the alphabet (“A”), followed by the object that has the next alphabet.
Step 3. Compare the next letters in a word if the first letters are the same
- For example, if the first two letters in one word are “Am” and the first two letters in another word are “An”, then place “Am” before “An”.
- Continue comparing the next letters in the word if the word continues to have the same letters, until you get a different letter. Then, place the word that has the letter that appears first in the alphabet before the other words.
- If you come to a situation where there are no letters to compare one word to another, the word with the least number of letters is listed first in alphabetical order.
- If the first word in both nouns is the same, look at the spelling of the next word to determine which word to write first.
Step 4. List people's names by last name, followed by first name and then initial or middle name
- If you're sorting books or documents alphabetically, it's easier to sort and search by author's last name.
- For example, “John W. Adams” would be written “Adams, John A.” and is written before “Adams, John B.”, which is written before “Adams, Lenny A.”
Step 5. The hyphenated name and title are one word
Step 6. Write the names of the numbers in the title to arrange them alphabetically
For example, “12 Angry Men” should be structured as if it were written like “Twelve Angry Men”.
Step 7. Make a note of the system you used to sort alphabetically
If you organize large amounts of data or objects, notes will help others to follow and maintain your system, as well as remind you if you forget.
Tips
- Ignore the articles at the beginning of the title in English. You can omit the English word “a”, “an”, or “the”, if it starts the title as they are used very often and can make searching for information arranged alphabetically by you become confusing.
- Place a copy of the alphabet in front of you or next to the objects you want to arrange alphabetically so you can still arrange them correctly.
