Putting words in alphabetical order in English means ordering the words according to their order in the dictionary. The place and order of each letter in the alphabet are determined. While preparing dictionaries, the words are arranged in accordance with the order of the letters in the alphabet. This order is called “alphabetical order” or “dictionary order”.
The order of letters in the English alphabet “a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z”. When asked to put words in alphabetical or dictionary order, we look at the first letter first. We write the word whose first letter comes before others at the top. Then we continue by listing the first letter that comes next. We look at the order of the second letters of the words with the same first letter and try to determine which one will come first.
Now let’s exemplify how to put the words “garden, school, house, notebook, pen, clock” in alphabetical order. We need to look at the first letters of the words. Here, we come across the letters “g, s, h, n, p, c”. Now we arrange these letters in the order they should be in the alphabet and we find the order of “c, g, h, n, p, s”. While doing this, you can voice the alphabet inside yourself. Then, we write the words starting with these letters in alphabetical order as “clock, garden, house, notebook, pen, school”.
In the example above, the ordering is quite easy as the first letters of the words are all different. When listing words with the same first letter, we look at the second letters first. If the second letters are the same, the third and the remaining letters are looked at.
For example, if we want to sort the words “seat, seal, safe” alphabetically, we look at the second letters since the first letters always start with “s”. Accordingly, the word “safe” should come first; because its second letter is “a”. For the second word, we should look at the fourth letter since the words have the same second and third letters. Thus, the correct order should be “safe, seal, seat”.
