alphabétique

Alphabétique is a term used in French to describe anything related to the alphabet or the method of ordering items according to the letters of the alphabet. In English, the corresponding concept is alphabetical order. The principle orders items by the sequence of their first letters, with tie-breakers using subsequent letters, and rules may vary by language or cataloging system.

In practice, alphabétique sorting is used for dictionaries, encyclopedias, index entries, bibliographies, catalogs, and directories. It is also common in computer science for sorting strings lexicographically, which may be case-insensitive or locale-aware. Sorting implementations must address issues such as diacritics, ligatures, and punctuation; in French, for example, letters with accents may be treated as their base letters in some conventions, while other locales preserve accent distinctions.

The term also encompasses lexical ordering for proper names and titles, with conventions often omitting leading articles (le, la, les, de) in catalog records. The concept underpins data organization, search indexing, and file naming schemes that rely on predictable, human-friendly order.

Historically, alphabétique ordering emerged with the development of alphabetic scripts and the expansion of dictionaries and catalogs in the Early Modern period. Its enduring value lies in providing a simple, scalable method to locate items without prior knowledge of their content, across books, databases, and directories.