General explanations (continued)

Ordering of entries

Entries are arranged in the Dictionary in the alphabetical order of their headwords. Alphabetization is based strictly upon the twenty-six letters of the standard English alphabet. An initial capital letter is treated as in no way distinct from a small one. The spacing within a headword consisting of two or more written words is disregarded. Hence, for example, the sequence of headwords all-rounder, All Saints, allseed, All Souls, allspice.

In a similar way, all characters and symbols that are not among the twenty-six letters are either disregarded, or treated like the alphabetical letters or combinations to which they are most nearly equivalent. Apostrophes, full points, hyphens, and spaces occurring anywhere within the headword are disregarded: hence, for the sake of ordering, p'an is equivalent to pan, met. to met, and co-op to coop. Diacritical accents are also ignored: so cañon is equivalent to canon, korin to krin. The ligatures æ and , naturally enough, are alphabetized as if written as ae and oe, ø as simple o; 'thorn' () and 'edh' () are treated as equivalent to th; and 'yogh' () as equivalent to gh.

Pairs of parentheses, enclosing optional letters, are ignored. A single opening parenthesis, marking off the last letter or letters of a word, functions in a way that is counter to the general rule: the letters following the opening parenthesis are disregarded for the purpose of ordering. So anachoret(e precedes anachoretal. The most typical function of this convention is to mark off a final silent -e that has little historical significance.

Headwords with the same spelling (homographs), including those rendered equivalent by the conventions just described, are normally ordered according to grammatical category. Prefixes and suffixes are labelled as such and treated as separate grammatical categories. Combining forms, though lacking a special label, are similarly treated. Variant and obsolete forms (subordinate words), and written or spoken abbreviations entered as main words, have likewise no special label, but are commonly treated as members of separate grammatical categories.

There is no absolutely fixed order in which grammatical categories are arranged. All other things being equal, the major grammatical categories of noun (substantive in the Dictionary's terminology), adjective, verb, and adverb, precede, in that order, the minor ones; but the ordering very frequently departs from this general principle, especially where a group of etymologically related homographs is arranged in an order that reflects the historical development.

Identically spelt headwords that also belong to the same grammatical category are distinguished by following superior numbers ('homonym numbers') and are usually arranged in the order of their earliest occurrence. Entries that are not explicitly labelled with a part of speech, but are treated as distinct grammatical categories (such as variant forms and abbreviations), are distinguished by superior numbering from others of the same kind, and not necessarily from unlabelled entries of other kinds.