[jcrawfordor]

There's an interesting article somewhere that I really wish I could find right now - the gist is that someone working at I think a dictionary publisher was confused to find a filing cabinet that contained an index of every word reversed in alphabetical order. It took some thinking to realize that this was a useful index to find all of the words that ended in a given suffix - e.g. go to "gni" to find the gerunds.

It's interesting to think though that maintaining a dictionary once meant having a large set of filing cabinets containing sheets of words sliced and diced in every way you might need.