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The problem with that is that you do have to distinguish the surnames that start with Mc- or Mac- because they were originally patronymic versus that do so by for other reasons — which is why Macedon and Macey aren’t in the Mc/Mac set that follow L and precede M. See Wikipedia’s list of Scottish writers for more examples of this peculiar name-sorting strategy.

The problem with that is that you do have to distinguish the surnames that start with Mc- or Mac- because they were originally patronymic from the ones that do so by for other reasons that patronymics — which is why Macedon and Macey aren’t in the Mc/Mac set that follow L and precede M. See Wikipedia’s list of Scottish writers for more examples of this peculiar name-sorting strategy.

Modern English has no such special needs apart from the unusual case of sorting people’s names, although words spelled with the lexical ligatures æ and œ must be treated as if spelled with two characters instead of one, so as though those were ae and oe respectively. That means that Cæsar sorts as though it were Caesar and œuvre as though it were oeuvre.

Notice how in Old English just like in today’s Icelandic, Æ was a real letter in its own right falling between A and B. It was not just a lexical ligature as in Cæsar. So you really have to know the language of the text you are sorting to know what rules to apply: Modern English equates æ to ae, but Old English did not, while German phonebooks equate ä to ae. Sorting can be hard if you let it be.

Modern English has no such special needs apart from the unusual case of sorting people’s names, although words spelled with the typographic ligatures æ and œ must be treated as if spelled with two characters instead of one, so as though those were ae and oe respectively. That means that Cæsar sorts as though it were Caesar and œuvre as though it were oeuvre.

Notice how in Old English just like in today’s Icelandic, Æ was a real letter in its own right falling between A and B. It was not just a typographic ligature as in Cæsar; it’s an actual lexical ligature, which means it’s its own letter, not just a typesetting matter. So you really have to know the language of the text you are sorting to know what rules to apply: Modern English equates æ to ae, but Old English did not, while German phonebooks equate ä to ae. Sorting can be hard if you let it be.

Note that only letters are supposed to be considered when sorting text. One ignores non-letters such as spaces, hyphens, dashes, or full stops, when sorting English text. That means that these are correctly sorted as text:

Diacritics are rare in English words. As such, the ordering of different diacritics against each other may not be especially well defined in older dictionaries. The case is rare enough that I haven’t yet found an example of it in the OED. The classic French example of cote < côte < coté < côté does not apply to English because we do not have all those words as separate in any English dictionary.

Modern English has no such special needs apart from the unusual case of sorting people’s names, although words spelled with the lexical ligatures æ and œ must be treated as though those well spelled with two characters instead of one, so as though those were ae and oe respectively. That means that Cæsar sorts as though it were Caesar and œuvre as though it were oeuvre.

This means that should an Ö occur in English text, it is to be treated just like a regular O unless there is also a version without the diacritic, as might occur with coöperate and cooperate or co-operate. Those three all have the same letters in them as far as English is concerned, differing only in non-letters.

Note that only letters are supposed to be considered when sorting text. One ignores non-letters such as spaces, hyphens, dashes, or full stops, when sorting English text. That means that the five imagined book-titles below are correctly sorted as text in this fashion:

Diacritics are rare in English words, occurring only in loanwords or words marked for poetic meter, as in learnèd or Faërie. Being so rare in the first place, the ordering of different diacritics against each other (like é vs. è vs. ê vs. ë) may not be especially well defined in older dictionaries. The need for distinguishing those is rare enough that I haven’t yet found a single example of this in the OED.

Modern English has no such special needs apart from the unusual case of sorting people’s names, although words spelled with the lexical ligatures æ and œ must be treated as if spelled with two characters instead of one, so as though those were ae and oe respectively. That means that Cæsar sorts as though it were Caesar and œuvre as though it were oeuvre.