Alphabetization and "the"?

apjanke

Hi folks.

In the 1Password desktop app for me, Login and other items, when sorted by Title, are alphabetized respecting the leading "the", "a", and "an" words. Like my login item for "The Atlantic" sorts under "T" between "Thaism" and "The Guardian", not under "A" between, uhh, "Arsenic" and "Audiophile".

Like, here's what I see:

I think maybe that's not "correct" or ideal, and it's inconvenient for me. I think of e.g. "The Atlantic" as being under "A", not "T".

What do you think of 1Password using librarian-style alphabetization, ignoring initial articles like "a", "an", and "the"? (Only respecting that if there is a space between the initial article and the rest of the name/title string, so stuff like "TheChive" gets alphabetized "correctly" under "T" like I think it should.(Like, once you get to "thebrokentoken.com" in this list, that's my fault/preference, and I think that should still sort under "T".)) (I don't know what the right term for this sort of "ignore-articles" alphabetization scheme is.)

(I'm running 1Password 8.10.16 on macOS 14.0.0, but I bet this behavior has been around for a while.)

Cheers,
Andrew

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1Password Version: 8.10.16
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: 14.0.0
Browser: Chrome

GreyM1P

Hi there @apjanke

We generally try to do as little with your items as we can, and that includes doing (potentially very fiddly) things with sorting.

When we sort by Title in 1Password, we perform a simple alphanumeric sort, and we specifically avoid inspecting your items too closely.

For cases where you'd like something sorted ignoring the The, it may be worth dropping it, or moving it to the end, as in New York Times or New York Times, The.

If we were to try and ignore the The in the Title of your items, there would be a couple of potential problems:

• It would require 1Password processing the Title of each of your items, and as I say, we try to "touch" your data as little as possible – we'd rather handle it blindly, so to speak, to maintain zero knowledge.
• This behaviour would need to be localised to other languages, potentially beyond the languages that 1Password officially supports. You might end up in a situation where, for example, "Le Monde" (in French) is sorted under M, but "Y Dinesydd" (in Welsh) might still be sorted under Y, instead of D, leading to inconsistent handling. This could also happen where 1Password misidentifies what language the Title of the item is using. As an example, 1Password might think that "Y Combinator" is Welsh and sort it under C.

This is likely to be one of those cases where "the less we know about your stuff, the better".

Let me know if you have any questions. :)

— Grey

apjanke

That makes sense. It's no biggie for me to manually edit those I want to sort differently.

Cheers,
Andrew

Dave_1P

I'm happy that Grey was able to shed more light on the behaviour here. 🙂

-Dave