system whereby strings of characters are placed in order by alphabet
Flags of certain countries at the Élysée Palace in Paris for a peace conference regarding Libya, 2011. The national flags (other than those of the host, France, Europe to its left and UN to its right, which are at the centre, place of honour) are arranged in French alphabetical order: Allemagne, Belgique, Canada, Danemark, Émirats Arabes Unis, Espagne, États-Unis, Grèce, Irak, Italie, Jordanie, Maroc, Norvège, Pays-Bas, Pologne, Qatar, Royaume-Uni. The last one, Ligue Arabe, is in lateral position because it's not a country. Alphabetical order is a system whereby character strings are placed in order based on the position of the characters in a specific ordering of an alphabet. It is one of the methods of collation. In mathematics, a lexicographical order is the generalization of the alphabetical order to other data types, such as sequences of numbers or other ordered mathematical objects.
When applied to strings or sequences that may contain digits, numbers or more elaborate types of elements, in addition to alphabetical characters, the alphabetical order is generally called a lexicographical order.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).