Alphabetical Word Sort
Many languages have their own special sorting order, so prior to sorting or re-sorting, check that you have selected the right language for the words being sorted. Spanish, for example, uses this order: A,B,C,CH,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,LL,M,N,Ñ,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z.
KeyWords and other comparisons require an alphabetically-ordered list in ascending order. If you get problems, please open the word lists in WordList, choose the "alphabetical" tab, sort by pressing the "Word" header until the sort is definitely alphabetical ascending, then choose the Save menu option.
Reverse Word Sort (Ctrl+F6)
This is so that you can sort words by suffix. The order is determined by word endings, not word beginnings. You will therefore find all the -ing forms together.
Word Length Sort (Shift+Ctrl+F6)
This is so that you can sort words by their length (1-letter, 2-letter, etc up to 50-letter words) Within a set of equal-length words, there's a second, alphabetical sort.
Consistency Sort
Press the "Texts" header to re-sort the words according to their consistency.
Check word list
Occasionally a word list may be found to contain items like these
with words which share the same alphabetical order but with slightly different spelling. This may also be because of some formatting problem, as here:
where the word THAN and ÞAN likewise share the same alphabetical rank order (even though ÞAN is certainly a typo or other error in this case).
A word list should ideally not contain words of equal rank as that makes computing key words trickier (the key words procedure could think that the word THAN has a frequency of only 6). To check whether you have this issue, choose the Check word list option in the menu.
If you do, and get a list shown of such pairs like this
you can then choose yes to merge each word with its partner or no to add an invisible space to one of the words in order to remove the equal ranking, or cancel -- in which case you might decide to clean up the source text using the Text Converter. If you do choose to merge, you will get the frequencies of the two words merged and the less frequent form can be zapped or left for later zapping as you prefer.
|