How Do You "Alphabetize" in Chinese?

Factual Questions
1

So, you go to the Office of Bureaucratic Offices, and they go to get your file, Joe Jones, they look under “J”, then “J-O”, you know the drill.

How do they do that with languages that don’t have an alphabet as such? Like Chinese?

2

The general concept is called collation. That wiki page has a brief explanation of how it’s done in languages like Chinese.

3

LMGTFY

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4

one more little data point:
The equivalent of a spelling bee in chinese schools is a competition to see who can use the dictionary. It’s not a simple process.
You start by counting how many strokes of the pen are used to draw the character, and then have to follow a lot of rules.
Apparently it is quite possible for an educated person to be unable to find a word in the dictionary.

5

In imperial China, each bureaucrat would devise his own system. It was job security for him, and for his son, who would get the job when the father retired. It also gave the bureaucrats far more power and may have been one reason why China stagnated and stopped being a major power.

6

Two good links

Why is Chinese so damn hard? Go to #5 (about halfway) for that, but the whole article is worth the read.
The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese(more technical).

7

Cite? Seems unlikely.

8

Nowadays a lot of people know pinyin, which is a way of writing chinese using an alphabet (it uses a subset of English letters, plus ü). Most young people know pinyin because it’s an efficient way to write chinese characters on computers or phones.

My WAG is that documents are filed in some cases using their pinyin spellings.

9

With most characters that are used at all, it is usually pretty simple to find a word in a Chinese dictionary (I have looked up thousands of characters and can’t ever remember not being able to find one). The first thing to understand is that every Chinese character has a “radical”. This is a portion of the character, that sometimes (but far from always) has some sort of core meaning of the character. For example, some of the more common radicals are the characters for “Wood”, “Person”, “Heart”, “Woman”. There are about 200 of them in total.

So if you look at the characters that have the “wood” radical, many of them are somewhat related, such as “Tree”, “Forest”, “Stick”. Of course, many of them aren’t related at all.

So to look a character up in a dictionary, you first need to find the radical. This isn’t always extremely easy, as a character may contain, for example, both the characters for “Person” and “Heart”. Once you are used to it though, you can almost always get it on the first try (and if not, you just try again). The dictionary is arranged by radical, with the radicals arranged by stroke count (fewest to most). So you go to the section for the radical you have identified. Next, you just need to count the number of total strokes in the character. Within each radical, the characters are arranged by stroke count.

There are usually only a few characters within each Radical-Stroke Count combination, so it is pretty easy to find the one you want. Where my explanation falls short, of course, is in how those characters within the same Radical-Stroke Count would be ordered. I believe there is some sort of way to order them, but I will leave that to a greater expert than me.

10

There are pinyin dictionaries these days alphabetized a-z. Then further delineated by tone, and finally by number of strokes.

As a Chinese student in the 1980’s, I spent hours every day looking up characters in the dictionary. It was rare to not be able to find a character after about the first month of practice. And the ones I couldn’t find were usually written multiple ways, and I’d be looking up the one way and the dictionary would have another way. “户” is an example of one that stymied me for a long time.