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lexicographic

What does lexicographically mean?

I saw a program in codeforces where it says, "Now Petya wants to compare those two strings lexicographically."

I didn't understand it. What does lexicographically mean?

Solution

  • I'm not sure if this is more of a stackoverflow question or not, but I could be wrong. . . Based on your question and its usage I would prefer a breakdown of the word "lexicographically".

    The root appears to be "lexicon", which we can see by this reference the definition is:

    "a book containing an alphabetical arrangement of the words in a language and their definitions"

    OR

    "the vocabulary of a language, an individual speaker or group of speakers, or a subject"

    OR (more related to computers)

    "the total stock of morphemes in a language"

    In this pdf the author says,

    "The lexicon of a computer language is its total inventory of words and symbols."

    Next, we want to look at the word "lexicography", this is the next layer to our process of building the word up from the root. First, let us look at the general definition. According to Merriam-Webster in this reference we see that lexicography is defined as such:

    "the editing or making of a dictionary"

    OR

    "the principles and practices of dictionary making"

    In this reference regarding Computation Lexicography the author states, "Computational Lexicology is the use of computers in the study of the lexicon. It has been more narrowly described by others (Amsler, 1980) as the use of computers in the study of machine-readable dictionaries."

    The next-to-last step is to look at the word without its description of the action occurring, that would be "lexicographic", as in lexicographic order. In this reference we see, "In mathematics, the lexicographic or lexicographical order (also known as lexical order, or dictionary order) is a generalization of the alphabetical order of the dictionaries to sequences of ordered symbols or, more generally, of elements of a totally ordered set."

    Lastly, we can see that the word is an adverb since in the example sentence it is describing the action that is occurring - also we see the use of "-ly" at the end of the word.

    It would appear that Petya would like to compare the two strings alphabetically and with regard to their potentially symbolic, or definitive, meaning within the dictionary of lexicons from which they exist.

    A fun little analysis project that took me on.