Alphabetical sort order icon meaning

Question

I noticed that icon repositories like Fontawesome have a lot of different icons for showing sort orders. The more variations I came across, the more confused I got.

_______1____________________2___________________3____________________4

I wanted to know what these icons represent.

I know what the arrows mean. Without the alphabet next to the arrow, a down arrow represents descending order while the up arrow represents ascending order. But the numbers and alphabets next to them made things confusing.

Answer 1

If you look at their names (sort-alpha-up, etc) you can deduct:

• the first and third icon (ending in "-alt") are alternate versions (meaning of secondary importance). my personal guess is these can be ignored for most purposes and agree they are somewhat confusing
• the second and fourth are the ones you should be looking at, because for most latin-based languages, alphabetical means A to Z. these hold the primary meaning which is, alphabetical down (A to Z sorting) and alphabetical up (Z to A sorting)

Another way to look at this is to totally ignore (remove) the arrows, then you're just left with 2 icons – AZ and ZA – which should be easier to read by most people.

Answer 2

Hope it helps

Ascending

A B C D

Descending

D C B A

1. Descending order alphabets sort Up
2. Ascending order alphabets sort Up
3. Descending order alphabets sort Down
4. Ascending order alphabets sort Down