ABSTRACT
A collapsed or ‘alphabetised’ text is a poem or passage of prose in which the words have been rearranged into alphabetical order. (There are variations on this, such as ‘rhyme sort’, or reversed sorting or listings that omit duplicates.) The result is a cluster of vocabulary that reflects the nature of the original text, but not its composed meaning. We can use these lists to make informed guesses about the original text, or to use its lexical choices for new creative work.
