Status Updates From Index, A History of the: A ...

<“…alphabetical order, though not unknown, was extremely rare during the early part of the Middle Ages. As the medieval historians Mary and Richard Rouse put it, ‘The Middle Ages did not like alphabetical order, which it considered to be the antithesis of reason.’

The book index: killing off experimental curiosity since the seventeenth century.

As for … whether we should use the Anglicized indexes or the Latinate indices - the great Victorian bibliographer Henry Wheatley …points to Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, where the word is indexes. If the Anglicized form is good enough for Shakespeare, reasons Wheatley, it should be good enough for us…. Indices are for mathematicians and economists; indexes are what you find at the back of a book.