Homograph numbers are automatically assigned to entries with identical headwords. They reflect the order in which the entries were created.
You can change the order that these entries are displayed. One way to do this is to change their homograph numbers:
In the Navigation Pane, click Lexicon, and then click Lexicon Edit or Browse.
In the Entries pane, configure the columns to show the Homograph number field as a column.
Edit the homograph number value for each of the entries with identical headwords to specify the order in which you want them to appear.
You can work with homographs number for each view using these dialog boxes:
Configure Headword Numbers (Dictionary and Reversal Indexes)
A lexicographer offered the following for your consideration:
Put the homograph first that the user of the dictionary is most likely to be looking for. The user may ignore the homograph number and not look past the first entry he encounters. So you want him to find the information he is looking for.
Put the most frequent homograph first. He is most likely to be looking for the more frequent item, but not necessarily so. He may be looking for a rare word that he doesn't know.
If you don't know the relative frequency of the homographs, use the grammatical category to order them.
Use this order: a) verb b) noun c) adjective d) adverb e) other (usually functors). This order corresponds roughly to the relative frequency of the grammatical categories, except that it puts verbs before nouns. (Nouns are more common than verbs.) This order is recommended because the user is more likely to have a problem with a verb and is therefore more likely to be looking for it.
Many modern dictionaries are abandoning the notion of homographs as an organizing principle. The reason is that the user almost never knows anything about etymology and therefore does not know ahead of time that a particular form might be split up into separate entries. Since dictionaries are organized on the basis of form, most users will expect to find one entry per form and will expect to find the information they are looking for under the first entry they come to. Unless they happen to notice the homograph number or happen to notice that there are two (or more) entries with the same headword, they may miss the information they are looking for. Therefore to serve the user best, we want to make it easiest for him and help guarantee success when he is trying to find a word or sense of a word. However, if you plan to include etymological information in your published dictionary, you should separate homographs. There is no easy way to specify which senses of a single entry belong to which etymology. So it is simplest to keep homographs separate.