The Curious History of Alphabetical Order

I've never given much thought to alphabetical order. It seems like a natural way of organizing information. But it turns out that it does have a history, and not that old a history at that. The Guardian reviews A Place for Everything by Judith Flanders, a book about the history of the alphabet and alphabetical order. The review makes the book sound quite fascinating. 

The slow rise of alphabetical order relied on many technologies coming together: the codex book (scrolls are fine for continuous reading, but rubbish for looking things up), pagination (rare in the earliest books) and the explosion of words that came with the arrival of paper and the printing press. Ultimately, Flanders suggests, the unstoppable democratisation of knowledge demanded alphabetical order. When the Word of God was contained only in churches and monasteries, there was little need for alphabetisation. But when mendicant preachers began crisscrossing Europe in the 12th century, they relied on handbooks such as Peter Lombard’s Sentences, which let them look for biblical keywords in the alphabetised index and construct ready-made sermons out of them.

Every dictionary compiler seems to have thought that he alone invented alphabetical order. Few realised its significance. Hugh of Pisa’s 12th-century Great Book of Derivations kept interrupting its alphabetical ordering of words by giving precedence to longer over smaller entries. John Balbi’s 13th-century Catholicon, another early dictionary, includes a pained entreaty about its alphabetical arrangement: “I have devised this order at the cost of great effort and strenuous application … I beg of you, therefore, good reader, do not scorn this great labour of mine and this order as something worthless.”