The Tyranny of the Alphabet: How We Order Knowledge

Scroll through the contacts on your phone. Look up a word in a dictionary. Find an author in a bookstore. In each case, your fingers and eyes perform a ritual so deeply ingrained it feels instinctual: you follow the alphabet. A, B, C, D… It’s the default setting for information, the bedrock of libraries, indexes, and databases. But have you ever stopped to ask why? Why does ‘A’ come first? What inherent logic places ‘K’ before ‘L’?

The simple, and perhaps unsettling, answer is that there is no logic. The alphabetical order we treat as a law of nature is one of the most profound and pervasive arbitrary systems ever invented. It’s a historical accident that became a cognitive shortcut, a form of intellectual tyranny that quietly shapes how we access, categorize, and even value knowledge.

From Ox to House: The Arbitrary Origins of Order

To understand the arbitrariness of the alphabet, we have to travel back more than 3,000 years to the ancient Levant. Our modern alphabet is a descendant of the one used by the Phoenicians, a seafaring people who developed a script where each symbol represented a consonant sound. The order of their alphabet was fixed, likely as a mnemonic device to help people learn it.

The first letter, ʾālep, meant ‘ox’ and was represented by a symbol that looked like an ox’s head. The second, bēt, meant ‘house’. When the Greeks adopted this script around the 8th century BCE, they kept the symbols and, crucially, kept the order. They flipped the ox head on its side and called it Alpha. They stylized the house symbol and called it Beta. And from Alpha-Beta, we get the word “alphabet.”

The sequence was never about function, frequency of use, or phonetic relationships. It was simply tradition. The order was preserved because… well, that’s how they learned it from the Phoenicians. This accident of history was then passed down to the Etruscans, then the Romans, and eventually to the 26 letters we use in English today.

It’s important to remember this is not a universal constant. Other writing systems have different organizing principles. Chinese characters, for instance, can be sorted by the number of strokes it takes to write them, or by their core component, known as a radical. This is a system based on visual structure, not a memorized, abstract sequence.

Life in the Alphabetical Filing Cabinet

Despite its random origins, alphabetical order—or alphabetization—has become the master organizing principle of the literate world. Its influence is so total that we often fail to see it.

• Dictionaries & Encyclopedias: This is the classic example. An aardvark will always be one of the first animals you encounter, while the zyzzyva (a tropical weevil) will always be the last. This ordering dictates the physical structure of reference books, turning the pursuit of knowledge into a linear treasure hunt.
• Libraries & Archives: While systems like the Dewey Decimal Classification are thematic, the final step in finding a non-fiction book often involves an alphabetical search by author’s last name. Fiction sections are almost always a pure A-to-Z author sort.
• Bureaucracy & Directories: From phone books of old to modern-day class rosters and employee databases, your identity is often reduced to the starting letter of your last name. Companies even exploit this, naming themselves “AAA Plumbing” to appear first in listings.
• The Digital World: Our digital tools, for all their power, are still beholden to the alphabet. Your computer’s file explorer, your music app’s artist list, and the dropdown menus on websites almost invariably default to A-Z sorting.

When ‘Apple’ Comes Before ‘Art’

So what’s the problem? Alphabetical order is simple, predictable, and everyone knows how to use it. It’s a democratic system where every entry has its place. But this simplicity comes at a cost. The tyranny of the alphabet lies in what it hides: context, relationship, and meaning.

In an alphabetical system, proximity means nothing. A dictionary places “Apple” lightyears away from “Banana”, “Fruit”, and “Orchard.” It wedges “Anarchy” next to “Anatomy”, and “Linguistics” next to “Linoleum.” Thematic and conceptual connections are obliterated in favor of an arbitrary phonetic sequence. It creates a flat information landscape, suggesting all entries are equally related (or unrelated) to their neighbors. This is fundamentally untrue.

This forced ordering can subtly distort our perception. By presenting unrelated topics as neighbors, it discourages the kind of associative thinking that leads to deeper understanding. It actively prevents us from seeing the forest for the trees—or, more accurately, from seeing the orchard for the alphabetically-listed ‘apple’.

Escaping the Tyranny: Conceptual Cartography

Acknowledging the alphabet’s limitations isn’t about discarding it. It’s about recognizing it as just one tool in a much larger organizational toolbox. Smart systems for organizing information often abandon the alphabet in favor of schemes that build meaning.

Thematic Sorting: The Grocery Store Method

Imagine if a grocery store were organized alphabetically. You’d find apples in Aisle 1, arugula in Aisle 2, and avocados in Aisle 3. Further down, bacon would sit next to bagels. It would be chaos. Instead, stores are organized thematically: produce, dairy, meat, and baked goods are grouped together. This is sorting by concept and use, which is far more intuitive for the task at hand. A thesaurus works the same way, grouping words by meaning, not by their first letter.

Hierarchical Sorting: The Family Tree

Another powerful method is hierarchy, which shows relationships of scale and inclusion. In biology, the Linnaean taxonomy (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species) is a beautiful example. It tells you not just what an organism is, but what it’s related to. A computer’s file system, with folders inside of folders, is another a perfect example of a hierarchy that allows for complex, nested organization.

Chronological and Geospatial Sorting

History is best understood chronologically, where cause and effect become clear. Data about elections or populations makes the most sense when sorted geospatially on a map. In these contexts, alphabetical order would be worse than useless; it would be actively misleading.

Rethinking Our Default Setting

The tyranny of the alphabet isn’t malicious. It’s the product of convenience and history. For centuries, it was the most efficient way to create a stable, searchable index in a world of physical paper. But in the digital age, we have an unprecedented opportunity to break free.

With a single click, we can now reorganize a list of songs by genre (thematic), release date (chronological), or artist (alphabetical). Search functions allow us to jump directly to the information we need, bypassing the A-to-Z plod entirely. We have the power to view information through multiple lenses, choosing the one that provides the most insight for a given task.

The alphabet isn’t going anywhere. It remains a useful, if blunt, instrument. But the next time you instinctively scroll to ‘M’ in your contacts, take a moment to appreciate the strange, accidental history of that gesture—and consider all the other, more meaningful ways the world of knowledge could be arranged.