<P> Capital letters (upper case) are generally considered to be identical to their corresponding lower case letters for the purposes of alphabetical ordering, though conventions may be adopted to handle situations where two strings differ only in capitalization . Various conventions also exist for the handling of strings containing spaces, modified letters (such as those with diacritics), and non-letter characters such as marks of punctuation . </P> <P> The result of placing a set of words or strings in alphabetical order is that all the strings beginning with the same letter are grouped together; and within that grouping all words beginning with the same two - letter sequence are grouped together; and so on . The system thus tends to maximize the number of common initial letters between adjacent words . </P> <P> Alphabetical order was first used in the 1st millennium BCE by Northwest Semitic scribes using the Abjad system . The first effective use of alphabetical order as a cataloging device among scholars may have been in ancient Alexandria . In the 1st century BCE, Roman writer Varro compiled alphabetic lists of authors and titles . In the 2nd century CE, Sextus Pompeius Festus wrote an encyclopedic epitome of the works of Verrius Flaccus, De verborum significatu, with entries in alphabetic order . In the 3rd century CE, Harpocration wrote a Homeric lexicon alphabetized by all letters . In the 10th century, the author of the Suda used alphabetic order with phonetic variations . In the 14th century, the author of the Fons memorabilium universi used a classification, but used alphabetical order within some of the books . </P> <P> In 1604 Robert Cawdrey had to explain in Table Alphabeticall, the first monolingual English dictionary, "Nowe if the word, which thou art desirous to finde, begin with (a) then looke in the beginning of this Table, but if with (v) looke towards the end ." Although as late as 1803 Samuel Taylor Coleridge condemned encyclopedias with "an arrangement determined by the accident of initial letters", many lists are today based on this principle . </P>

Who decided on the order of the alphabet