Alphabetizing

By Steve Katz

Yesterday I was organizing my mail folders in Gmail and I wanted to move two of the labels that I don’t use very often to the end of the list. It is easy to move something to the top of the alphabetical order by placing a symbol (~, $, *) or a space in front of the word. I was hoping that some of these symbols would fall at the end of the alphabet. I checked an ASCII table, figuring my answer was there. I was wrong. The symbols listed after Z didn't alphabetize to the end of the list as I had hoped. I decided to play with the Character Viewer (Mac), and after trying various symbols ✄ ✓ ✠ ✩ I found that the Greek alphabet comes after the letter Z. One cool thing about using the Greek alphabet was that the letters look the same as in English but send my labels to the bottom of the list. “ADE” in the image below actually starts with the Greek letter alpha, and “Korea Network” with kappa.