Alphabetical Order | ABC Order | Learn how to place words in alphabetical order.

Alphabetical Order for Kids Hey kids, so by now you've learned the alphabet. You know your ABCs from your 1-2-3s, which is fantastic. That means you can say all the letters that make up all the words in the English language in the order that they appear in the alphabet, right? You may have learned the alphabet from a song like this. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, and Z. Or you may have learned them from a toy or a game that your parents bought you. Or you may have just been born knowing the alphabet. Well, probably not. But either way, you have knowledge of this most important element of speaking, writing, and spelling. The letters that make up the English language. So the question is, now that you know the alphabet, are you able to put things into alphabetical order? Alphabetical order is defined as a method in which names, terms, or words are arranged in the same order as the letters of the alphabet. In other words, being able to put them into alphabetical order means being able to identify the first letter of the group of words and then organizing those words in the correct order. Let's start with the basics. As you may know, everything in the world, from objects around you to people's names to things like ideas, they all start with the letter of the alphabet. Your name, your dog's name, your friend's names, the items of clothes you're wearing, all the stuff in your house. These are all things that you can use a word to describe. And every one of those words starts with the letter. Foot, table, pizza, car, school. They all start with the letter and can be put into alphabetical order. But let's start with this list of animals. Shark, horse, cat, rhino, pig, elephant, octopus. All these words start with the letter, right? Shark starts with S. Horse with H. Cat with C. Rhino with R. Pig with P. Elephant with an E. And octopus with an O. Right now, these words are definitely not in alphabetical order. How do we know? Let's take the first word shark. It starts with S. How about the second word horse? It starts with H. Think back to that alphabet song or however else you learned the alphabet. Where does S fall in that song? What about H? As you can see, S comes after H. So, going back to our list of animals, shark should come after horse when we alphabetize them. What about fish? That starts with F, which means fish should come before shark and horse because F comes before both H and S in the alphabet. And cat? Since that word starts with C, it would come before all of them. Starting to make sense? So, putting shark, horse, fish, and cat in alphabetical order would mean rearranging them so they look like this. Cat, fish, horse, shark. Now you're getting it. If we add in rhino, elephant, dog, and octopus, the list would now read cat, dog, elephant, fish, horse, octopus, and shark. That's because in the alphabet, C comes before D, D before E, E before F, F before H, H before O, and O before S, and so on. Once you remember that you always have to go back to your original list of letters that you already know, you can put almost anything in alphabetical order. You may have figured out by now that there's a catch. What happens if you have a list of words that all start with the same letter, and you want to put those into alphabetical order? Now what? For example, what happens if your animal list is cheetah, cat, cow, crocodile, and chipmunk? They all start with C. Well, here's a simple rule. If the first letter of the group of words is the same, in this case C, then we need to take a look at the second letter in each word and use those to alphabetize the list. In our list above, our second letters are H in cheetah, A in cat, O in cow, R in crocodile, and H in chipmunk. So putting them in alphabetical order, you'd start with cat, since the second letter is A. Then go to cheetah, because the second letter is H. Then, wait a minute, the second letter in chipmunk is also H. So how do we handle that? Go to the third letter, which is I. So cheetah would come second, and chipmunk would come third, because the E in cheetah comes before the I in chipmunk. Then we'd have cow, and then crocodile. Make sense? Can you put the following items of clothing in alphabetical order? I'll give you a minute. That's right! It's hat, jacket, shoe, sock, underwear. Okay, how about this list? You got it! It's tack, television, tell, tiny, tissue. Did you see how in that list you had to go to the fourth letter to put tell and television in order? Well done! I think you've got the hang of it. The more you practice, the better you'll do. Soon, you'll be arranging everything in alphabetical order. Thanks for following Clarendon Learning. Be sure to subscribe. For more free resources, check us out at clarendonlearning.org.