alphasort

English

Etymology

Blend of alphabet +‎ sort

Noun

alphasort (plural alphasorts)

1. The process of sorting in alphabetical order, especially when performed in an automated fashion.
   • 1985, Verónica Lawson, Tools for the trade: translating and the computer 5:

     We solved the problem, for us, by starting every entry with an initial letter. So far, since upper or lower case can be of vital significance (e.g. MW, mW), we have had to accept the shortcoming inherent in the system, and have two alphasorts.

   • 1997, Nick Roussopoulos. Yannis Kotidis, Mema Roussopoulos, “Cubetree: organization of and bulk incremental updates on the data cube”, in SIGMOD '97 Proceedings of the 1997 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data:

     At the fastest reported sort rate of lGB per minute on the alphasort machine [NBC+ 94], re-computation of the cube for a data collection rate of 10GB a day would require roughly one day to sort 4 month data collection.

   • 1998, Michael P. Oakes, Statistics for corpus linguistics, page 156:

     For example, in Spanish word lists the letter pairs ch and ll are normally sorted after c and l respectively. COCOA enables such a sorting order to be specified, so llano comes after luz rather than before it as would happen naturally with an English alphasort.