From Caroline Macafee
Dyce, Aberdeenshire
Further to the discussion of “alphabetical bias”
(8 December, p 57;
Feedback, 17 November),
I cannot comment on proper names, but the distribution of the
general English vocabulary through the alphabet is well known to lexicographers.
When I edited A Concise Ulster Dictionary (OUP, 1996), I was guided by
Thorndike’s breakdown of the alphabet into 105 blocks, reproduced in Sidney
Landau’s Dictionaries: The art and craft of lexicography.
There are 60 blocks up to the end of M. So about 57 per cent of English words
fall in the first half of the alphabet, compared to the 65 per cent of surnames
(by weight) that Feedback reports from the London telephone book.
