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47-613: P , or p , is the sixteenth letter of the Latin alphabet , used in the modern English alphabet , the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is pee (pronounced / ˈ p iː / ), plural pees . The Semitic Pê (mouth), as well as the Greek Π or π ( Pi ), and the Etruscan and Latin letters that developed from the former alphabet all symbolized /p/ ,

94-411: A multigraph . Multigraphs include digraphs of two letters (e.g. English ch , sh , th ), and trigraphs of three letters (e.g. English tch ). The same letterform may be used in different alphabets while representing different phonemic categories. The Latin H , Greek eta ⟨Η⟩ , and Cyrillic en ⟨Н⟩ are homoglyphs , but represent different phonemes. Conversely,

141-509: A lowercase form (also called minuscule ). Upper- and lowercase letters represent the same sound, but serve different functions in writing. Capital letters are most often used at the beginning of a sentence, as the first letter of a proper name or title, or in headers or inscriptions. They may also serve other functions, such as in the German language where all nouns begin with capital letters. The terms uppercase and lowercase originated in

188-539: A variety of modern uses in mathematics, science, and engineering . People and objects are sometimes named after letters, for one of these reasons: The word letter entered Middle English c.  1200 , borrowed from the Old French letre . It eventually displaced the previous Old English term bōcstæf ' bookstaff '. Letter ultimately descends from the Latin littera , which may have been derived from

235-530: A voiceless bilabial plosive . In English orthography , ⟨p⟩ represents the sound / p / . A common digraph in English is ⟨ph⟩ , which represents the sound / f / , and can be used to transliterate ⟨φ⟩ phi in loanwords from Greek . In German, the digraph ⟨pf⟩ is common, representing a labial affricate /pf/ . Most English words beginning with ⟨p⟩ are of foreign origin, primarily French, Latin and Greek; these languages preserve

282-409: A computer collation algorithm is complex, and simple attempts will fail. For example, unless the algorithm has at its disposal an extensive list of family names, there is no way to decide if "Gillian Lucille van der Waal" is "van der Waal, Gillian Lucille", "Waal, Gillian Lucille van der", or even "Lucille van der Waal, Gillian". Ordering by surname is frequently encountered in academic contexts. Within

329-571: A few cases, such as Arabic and Kiowa , the alphabet has been completely reordered. Alphabetization rules applied in various languages are listed below. Collation algorithms (in combination with sorting algorithms ) are used in computer programming to place strings in alphabetical order. A standard example is the Unicode Collation Algorithm , which can be used to put strings containing any Unicode symbols into (an extension of) alphabetical order. It can be made to conform to most of

376-471: 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 or upper case letters are generally considered to be identical to their corresponding lower case letters for the purposes of alphabetical ordering, although conventions may be adopted to handle situations where two strings differ only in capitalization. Various conventions also exist for

423-490: A single multi-author paper, ordering the authors alphabetically by surname, rather than by other methods such as reverse seniority or subjective degree of contribution to the paper, is seen as a way of "acknowledg[ing] similar contributions" or "avoid[ing] disharmony in collaborating groups". The practice in certain fields of ordering citations in bibliographies by the surnames of their authors has been found to create bias in favour of authors with surnames which appear earlier in

470-449: Is r , which comes after e (the fourth letter of Aster ) in the alphabet. Those words themselves are ordered based on their sixth letters ( l , n and p respectively). Then comes At , which differs from the preceding words in the second letter ( t comes after s ). Ataman comes after At for the same reason that Aster came after As . Attack follows Ataman based on comparison of their third letters, and Baa comes after all of

517-521: Is a system whereby character strings 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 . In mathematics, a lexicographical order is the generalization of the alphabetical order to other data types, such as sequences of numbers or other ordered mathematical objects . When applied to strings or sequences that may contain digits, numbers or more elaborate types of elements, in addition to alphabetical characters,

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564-456: Is considered to be a separate letter from ⟨n⟩ , though this distinction is not usually recognised in English dictionaries. In computer systems, each has its own code point , U+006E n LATIN SMALL LETTER N and U+00F1 ñ LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH TILDE , respectively. Letters may also function as numerals with assigned numerical values, for example with Roman numerals . Greek and Latin letters have

611-411: Is indicated by the existence of precomposed characters for use with computer systems (for example, ⟨á⟩ , ⟨à⟩ , ⟨ä⟩ , ⟨â⟩ , ⟨ã⟩ .) In the following table, letters from multiple different writing systems are shown, to demonstrate the variety of letters used throughout the world. Alphabetical order Alphabetical order

658-497: Is thought to have created the world's first library catalog , known as the Pinakes , with scrolls shelved in alphabetical order of the first letter of authors' names. In the 1st century BC, 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

705-544: The Proto-Indo-European initial *p. Native English cognates of such words often start with ⟨f⟩ , since English is a Germanic language and thus has undergone Grimm's law ; a native English word with an initial /p/ would reflect Proto-Indo-European initial *b, which is so rare that its existence as a phoneme is disputed. However, native English words with non-initial ⟨p⟩ are quite common; such words can come from either Kluge's law or

752-521: The 3rd century CE, Harpocration wrote a Homeric lexicon alphabetized by all letters. The 10th century saw major alphabetical lexicons of Greek (the Suda ), Arabic ( Ibn Faris 's al-Mujmal fī al-Lugha ), and Biblical Hebrew ( Menahem ben Saruq 's Mahberet ). Alphabetical order as an aid to consultation flourished in 11th-century Italy, which contributed works on Latin ( Papias 's Elementarium ) and Talmudic Aramaic ( Nathan ben Jehiel 's Arukh ). In

799-626: The 7th–6th centuries BCE. In the Book of Jeremiah , the prophet utilizes the Atbash substitution cipher , based on alphabetical order. Similarly, biblical authors used acrostics based on the (ordered) Hebrew alphabet . The first effective use of alphabetical order as a cataloging device among scholars may have been in ancient Alexandria, in the Great Library of Alexandria , which was founded around 300 BCE. The poet and scholar Callimachus , who worked there,

846-668: The Danish king Christian IX comes after his predecessor Christian VIII . Languages which use an extended Latin alphabet generally have their own conventions for treatment of the extra letters. Also in some languages certain digraphs are treated as single letters for collation purposes. For example, the Spanish alphabet treats ñ as a basic letter following n , and formerly treated the digraphs ch and ll as basic letters following c and l , respectively. Now ch and ll are alphabetized as two-letter combinations. The new alphabetization rule

893-641: The Greek diphthera 'writing tablet' via Etruscan . Until the 19th century, letter was also used interchangeably to refer to a speech segment . Before alphabets, phonograms , graphic symbols of sounds, were used. There were three kinds of phonograms: verbal, pictures for entire words, syllabic, which stood for articulations of words, and alphabetic, which represented signs or letters. The earliest examples of which are from Ancient Egypt and Ancient China, dating to c.  3000 BCE . The first consonantal alphabet emerged around c.  1800 BCE , representing

940-476: The Greek letter Rho . [REDACTED] Letter (alphabet) A letter is a type of grapheme , the smallest functional unit within a writing system. Letters are graphemes that broadly correspond to phonemes , the smallest functional units of sound in speech. 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

987-708: The Phoenicians, Semitic workers in Egypt. Their script was originally written and read from right to left. From the Phoenician alphabet came the Etruscan and Greek alphabets. From there, the most widely used alphabet today emerged, Latin, which is written and read from left to right. The Phoenician alphabet had 22 letters, nineteen of which the Latin alphabet used, and the Greek alphabet, adapted c.  900 BCE , added four letters to those used in Phoenician. This Greek alphabet

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1034-421: The alphabet, while this effect does not appear in fields in which bibliographies are ordered chronologically. If a phrase begins with a very common word (such as "the", "a" or "an", called articles in grammar), that word is sometimes ignored or moved to the end of the phrase, but this is not always the case. For example, the book " The Shining " might be treated as "Shining", or "Shining, The" and therefore before

1081-404: The alphabetical order is generally called a lexicographical order . To determine which of two strings of characters comes first when arranging in alphabetical order, their first letters are compared. If they differ, then the string whose first letter comes earlier in the alphabet comes before the other string. If the first letters are the same, then the second letters are compared, and so on. If

1128-594: The book title " Summer of Sam ". However, it may also be treated as simply "The Shining" and after "Summer of Sam". Similarly, " A Wrinkle in Time " might be treated as "Wrinkle in Time", "Wrinkle in Time, A", or "A Wrinkle in Time". All three alphabetization methods are fairly easy to create by algorithm, but many programs rely on simple lexicographic ordering instead. The prefixes M and Mc in Irish and Scottish surnames are abbreviations for Mac and are sometimes alphabetized as if

1175-503: The consonant cluster /sp/ (PIE: *p has been preserved after s). P is the eighth least frequently used letter in the English language. In most European languages, ⟨p⟩ represents the sound / p / . In the International Phonetic Alphabet , ⟨p⟩ is used to represent the voiceless bilabial plosive . The Latin letter P represents the same sound as the Greek letter Pi , but it looks like

1222-438: The days of handset type for printing presses. Individual letter blocks were kept in specific compartments of drawers in a type case. Capital letters were stored in a higher drawer or upper case. In most alphabetic scripts, diacritics (or accents) are a routinely used. English is unusual in not using them except for loanwords from other languages or personal names (for example, naïve , Brontë ). The ubiquity of this usage

1269-622: The distinct forms of ⟨S⟩ , the Greek sigma ⟨Σ⟩ , and Cyrillic es ⟨С⟩ each represent analogous /s/ phonemes. Letters are associated with specific names, which may differ between languages and dialects. Z , for example, is usually called zed outside of the United States, where it is named zee . Both ultimately derive from the name of the parent Greek letter zeta ⟨Ζ⟩ . In alphabets, letters are arranged in alphabetical order , which also may vary by language. In Spanish, ⟨ñ⟩

1316-412: 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. The standard order of

1363-447: 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 of the strings beginning with the same letter are grouped together; within that grouping all words beginning with the same two-letter sequence are grouped together; and so on. The system thus tends to maximize

1410-571: The language-specific conventions described above by tailoring its default collation table. Several such tailorings are collected in Common Locale Data Repository . The principle behind alphabetical ordering can still be applied in languages that do not strictly speaking use an alphabet – for example, they may be written using a syllabary or abugida – provided the symbols used have an established ordering. For logographic writing systems, such as Chinese hanzi or Japanese kanji ,

1457-571: The late 7th and early 8th centuries. Finally, many slight letter additions and drops were made to the common alphabet used in the western world. Minor changes were made such as the removal of certain letters, such as thorn ⟨Þ þ⟩ , wynn ⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩ , and eth ⟨Ð ð⟩ . A letter can have multiple variants, or allographs , related to variation in style of handwriting or printing . Some writing systems have two major types of allographs for each letter: an uppercase form (also called capital or majuscule ) and

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1504-411: The letters of the alphabet. Another method is for numbers to be sorted alphabetically as they would be spelled: for example 1776 would be sorted as if spelled out "seventeen seventy-six", and 24 heures du Mans as if spelled "vingt-quatre..." (French for "twenty-four"). When numerals or other symbols are used as special graphical forms of letters, as 1337 for leet or the movie Seven (which

1551-509: The letters were separate—"æther" and "aether" would be ordered the same relative to all other words. This is true even when the ligature is not purely stylistic, such as in loanwords and brand names. Special rules may need to be adopted to sort strings which vary only by whether two letters are joined by a ligature. When some of the strings contain numerals (or other non-letter characters), various approaches are possible. Sometimes such characters are treated as if they came before or after all

1598-463: The method of radical-and-stroke sorting is frequently used as a way of defining an ordering on the symbols. Japanese sometimes uses pronunciation order, most commonly with the Gojūon order but sometimes with the older Iroha ordering. In mathematics, lexicographical order is a means of ordering sequences in a manner analogous to that used to produce alphabetical order. Some computer applications use

1645-399: The modern ISO basic Latin alphabet is: An example of straightforward alphabetical ordering follows: Another example: The above words are ordered alphabetically. As comes before Aster because they begin with the same two letters and As has no more letters after that whereas Aster does. The next three words come after Aster because their fourth letter (the first one that differs)

1692-465: The number of common initial letters between adjacent words. Alphabetical order was first used in the 1st millennium BCE by Northwest Semitic scribes using the abjad system. 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. Parts of the Bible are dated to

1739-422: The others because it has a different first letter. When some of the strings being ordered consist of more than one word, i.e., they contain spaces or other separators such as hyphens , then two basic approaches may be taken. In the first approach, all strings are ordered initially according to their first word, as in the sequence: In the second approach, strings are alphabetized as if they had no spaces, giving

1786-693: The same as the base letter for alphabetical ordering purposes. For example, rôle comes between rock and rose , as if it were written role . However, languages that use such letters systematically generally have their own ordering rules. See § Language-specific conventions below. In most cultures where family names are written after given names , it is still desired to sort lists of names (as in telephone directories) by family name first. In this case, names need to be reordered to be sorted correctly. For example, Juan Hernandes and Brian O'Leary should be sorted as "Hernandes, Juan" and "O'Leary, Brian" even if they are not written this way. Capturing this rule in

1833-576: The second half of the 12th century, Christian preachers adopted alphabetical tools to analyse biblical vocabulary. This led to the compilation of alphabetical concordances of the Bible by the Dominican friars in Paris in the 13th century, under Hugh of Saint Cher . Older reference works such as St. Jerome 's Interpretations of Hebrew Names were alphabetized for ease of consultation. The use of alphabetical order

1880-441: The sequence: The second approach is the one usually taken in dictionaries , and it is thus often called dictionary order by publishers . The first approach has often been used in book indexes , although each publisher traditionally set its own standards for which approach to use therein; there was no ISO standard for book indexes ( ISO 999 ) before 1975. In French, modified letters (such as those with diacritics ) are treated

1927-452: The spelling is Mac in full. Thus McKinley might be listed before Mackintosh (as it would be if it had been spelled out as "MacKinley"). Since the advent of computer-sorted lists, this type of alphabetization is less frequently encountered, though it is still used in British telephone directories. The prefix St or St. is an abbreviation of "Saint", and is traditionally alphabetized as if

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1974-463: The spelling is Saint in full. Thus in a gazetteer St John's might be listed before Salem (as if it would be if it had been spelled out as "Saint John's"). Since the advent of computer-sorted lists, this type of alphabetization is less frequently encountered, though it is still sometimes used. Ligatures (two or more letters merged into one symbol) which are not considered distinct letters, such as Æ and Œ in English, are typically collated as if

2021-436: Was initially resisted by scholars, who expected their students to master their area of study according to its own rational structures; its success was driven by such tools as Robert Kilwardby 's index to the works of St. Augustine , which helped readers access the full original text instead of depending on the compilations of excerpts which had become prominent in 12th century scholasticism . The adoption of alphabetical order

2068-467: Was issued by the Royal Spanish Academy in 1994. These digraphs were still formally designated as letters but they are no longer so since 2010. On the other hand, the digraph rr follows rqu as expected (and did so even before the 1994 alphabetization rule), while vowels with acute accents ( á, é, í, ó, ú ) have always been ordered in parallel with their base letters, as has the letter ü . In

2115-523: Was part of the transition from the primacy of memory to that of written works. The idea of ordering information by the order of the alphabet also met resistance from the compilers of encyclopaedias in the 12th and 13th centuries, who were all devout churchmen. They preferred to organise their material theologically – in the order of God's creation, starting with Deus (meaning God). In 1604 Robert Cawdrey had to explain in Table Alphabeticall ,

2162-505: Was stylised as Se7en ), they may be sorted as if they were those letters. Natural sort order orders strings alphabetically, except that multi-digit numbers are treated as a single character and ordered by the value of the number encoded by the digits. In the case of monarchs and popes , although their numbers are in Roman numerals and resemble letters, they are normally arranged in numerical order: so, for example, even though V comes after I,

2209-504: Was the first to assign letters not only to consonant sounds, but also to vowels . The Roman Empire further developed and refined the Latin alphabet, beginning around 500 BCE. During the fifth and sixth centuries, the development of lowercase letters began to emerge in Roman writing. At this point, paragraphs, uppercase and lowercase letters, and the concept of sentences and clauses still had not emerged; these final bits of development emerged in

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