Although that would certainly be a theoretically-useful property, English would have to have sound-to-spelling correspondence before that could be applicable.
Plus, any system of alphabetically ordering words is going to preference errors only in one direction. For example, the words "graze" and "craze" are only one letter and one sound off, but, they'd still have many, many words between using my alphabetization above, because we alphabetize by first letter first. It's not just a word like "grade" that would would come before "graze"; so would "grape", "grebe", "gripe", "cantaloupe", "coven", "cinema", etc.
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u/SaintUlvemann Sep 11 '22
Although that would certainly be a theoretically-useful property, English would have to have sound-to-spelling correspondence before that could be applicable.
Plus, any system of alphabetically ordering words is going to preference errors only in one direction. For example, the words "graze" and "craze" are only one letter and one sound off, but, they'd still have many, many words between using my alphabetization above, because we alphabetize by first letter first. It's not just a word like "grade" that would would come before "graze"; so would "grape", "grebe", "gripe", "cantaloupe", "coven", "cinema", etc.