Greek letters prefixing chemical terms, star names, etc., are customarily spelled out, without a hyphen ( New Hart’s Rules, 2nd ed., p. However, in chemical compounds beginning with a prefix, Greek letter, or numeral, the prefix, Greek letter, or numeral is ignored in the sorting. Alternatively, they may be interspersed in alphabetical order as if the numeral or symbol were spelled out, and they may be also be double-posted if they appear at the top of the index. This is preferred by the International and British Standard, and when there are many such entries in a work. Numerals and Symbols at the Beginning of EntriesĮntries that begin with numerals or symbols may be sorted at the top of the index, before the alphabetical sequence. See New Hart’s Rules, 2nd ed., section 19.3.2, and Kate Mertes, “Classical and Medieval Names” in I ndexing Names, edited by Noeline Bridge. When people of different statuses - saints, popes, rulers (perhaps of more than one country), nobles, commoners - share a name, these have to be sorted hierarchically. If you are writing your own index in a word processor, you will have to sort these manually. An indexer with dedicated software can insert coding to force these to sort correctly. These could be rulers or popes, or numbered articles or laws, etc. Names and terms followed by numbers are not ordered strictly alphabetically. 385) recommends retaining the strict alphabetical order created by indexing software. However, the second edition of New Hart’s Rules recognizes that most people do not understand this hierarchy and that alphabetizing this way is more work for the indexer. You may see this in older books, and it occasionally comes up in indexers’ discussions. In the first edition of New Hart’s Rules, names and terms beginning with the same word were ordered according to a hierarchy: people places subjects, concepts, and objects titles of works. The variations on Erie-Lackawanna, for example, would normally have another word, such as “Rail Road,” following them.) Not all of them would appear in an index. (The items in the table were chosen to demonstrate how the different systems handle spaces, hyphens, commas, and ampersands. The following table comparing these systems uses Microsoft Word and SKY Indexing Software with various settings. Dedicated indexing software can use either system along with variations. If you are writing your own index in a word processing program, it will use word-by-word sorting. Most US publishers prefer the letter-by-letter system, in which alphabetizing continues up to the first parenthesis or comma, ignoring spaces, hyphens, and other punctuation. However, the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed., treats hyphenated compounds as one word (sec. According to New Hart’s Rules, 2nd ed., hyphens are treated as spaces except where the first element is a prefix, not a word on its own (p. In the word-by-word system, generally used in indexes in Great Britain, alphabetizing proceeds up to the first space and then starts over. Occasionally an indexer might find, in the midst of a project, that switching to the other system would be better, but this must be cleared with the publisher. If you are writing an index or hiring an indexer, you have to know which system the publisher uses. There are two main systems of alphabetizing - word-by-word and letter-by-letter - with some variations within each system. Hunting for an organization or business whose name was just initials or began with initials was sometimes tricky, but I soon learned that if I did not find something interspersed with other entries, I could look at the beginning of that letter.Īs an indexer, I have to know the conventions of alphabetizing so I can enter terms in the software program, and like so many other things in editorial work, there are different standards to follow. I rarely had to alphabetize anything outside of school assignments (I did not organize my spices alphabetically), but I had to understand alphabetization to find a word in a dictionary, a name in a phone book, a card in a library catalog, or a folder in a file cabinet. Lankin, Lanky, Lenkin, Lincoln, Linkin. Go by the first letters - Bincoln, Fincoln, Lincoln, Mincoln - and if they’re all the same, look at the second, then the third, etc. The alphabetizing I learned in school so many years ago - all before PCs and the Internet, of course - was easy.
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