Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2007 July 25

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July 25

Ignoring Articles In Alphabetical Order

When items in a list are placed in alphabetical order, the article "the" is generally ignored. So, for example, "The Wizard of Oz" would be alphabetized under "W" for "Wizard" as opposed to "T" for "The". First question -- why is this? And, in light of the answer to the first question, please address this second question. Why are subsequent occurrences of the article "the" not ignored? In other words, if you have "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" ... the first "the" is ignored, but the second and the third "the" are not ignored. That is, we do not alphabetize the title as "Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe". What is the reasoning behind this? And, in the age of computers, would not it be easier to simply use the initial "The" when alphabetizing (i.e., a computer program will read the letter "t" and sort accordingly regardless if the initial word is "the" or some other "t" word). Thanks. (JosephASpadaro 04:07, 25 July 2007 (UTC))

The T-section of the list will grow very long and become a list by itself (so what you will actually get is a list within a list, which can be cumbersome), if "The" is not ignored. The subsequent occurrences of "the" would not contribute to this lengthening. Cheers.--K.C. Tang 05:05, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

To be fair, later occurrences would contribute slightly to bunching: for example, "The Lion in Winter", "The Lion King", "The Lion, the Fox, and the Ass", "The Lion, the Lamb, the Man", "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe", "The Lion Vrie". But the effect this has on actual lists is vanishingly small. And as you note, if a list is divided by first letter, the divisions are not affected by this phrase-internal convention. Tesseran 05:51, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

To answer your second question, it certainly would be easier to alphabetize naively. It would also be easier to use fixed-width fonts in single colors on monitors with fixed resolutions; to order numbers as 1, 10, 100, 11, 19, 2, 20; to alphabetize A after z, and characters like é after Z; or even to ban such characters altogether. That is, as long as by "easier" you mean "easier for the person designing the program". But the triumph of the modern computing era has been that we have enough programmer-hours and enough processor cycles that we can instead design programs that are easier for the user. Tesseran 06:18, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

The only thing missing is enough programmer-people who understand what is easy for the user.  --Lambiam 06:52, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

I remember a website where the programmer went through the trouble of detecting spaces in the credit card number to issue an error message that spaces weren't allowed. Gee, if you can find the spaces, you can take them out too! I also rail against sites which only give 16 characters to enter the credit card number. Those spaces make it easier to avoid making mistakes typing in one's cc number. Donald Hosek 16:34, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Quite irritating indeed. For sheer perversity, however, no web form can match the voice-driven telephone interfaces some companies force you into. I've spent over an hour trying to figure out how to mispronounce and rearrange my name so that it would be understood by the computer system (it turned out to involve combining different parts in creative ways and then running them all together!), when it would have taken 10 seconds to punch in my record number on the telephone keypad. So sometimes even when the designers make an effort to make things "friendly" instead of doing what's easy, it can backfire severely. --Reuben 04:19, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, all! (JosephASpadaro 19:31, 30 July 2007 (UTC))