alphabetical would dark ride or darkness come first?

Dark ride because the space makes it two words.

dark

comes before any longer word starting with those letters.

imagine the chaos in ordering the following

a

a a

a b

a b b

a ba

aa

aa a

-=-

dark aardvaark

dark zone

must come before

darkbeast

-=-

some computer programs ignore "white space" characters. with these

dark beast and darkbeast would be considered "indistinguishable" and darkness would occur before dark ride. This is NOT a "pure" alphabetical ordering. In a "pure" ordering, the space has higher prescedence than "a" - the most common exception is leftmost spaces. " z" would not (and should not) occur before "a".

-=-

does this make more sense?

a

a a

aa

aa a

a b

a ba

a b b

ba

b b

In the rules of alphabetization that I know and follow, a space comes before any letter. this is why dog comes before dogs, after all. So, dark ride should be before darkness. the space after the k precedes the n.

Darkness. The n is before the r (in Dark Ride) in the alphabet

Darkness

dark ride

then

darkness

(you take notice of the space - this is 'word-by-word' sorting and is common in libraries)

You CAN sort by letter - which will change the order, as you ignore the spaces. More common in phone directories.

All that matters is you are consistent.