Comparing and Contrasting World Book 2020 and Encyclopedia Britannica
According to his book The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, A. J. Jacobs claims that the 2002 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica begins with the entry a-ak and ends with the entry Zywiec.
a-ak is a redirect to gagaku, which is a form of Japanese music. You can see the modern entry on the web here, which, as a I write these words is twenty-two years past the edition Jacobs read.
Zywiec, to quote Jacobs, “is a town in south-central Poland. It’s known for its large breweries and a 16th-century sculpture called The Dormant Virgin. Population thirty-two thousand.” And, again, here is the link to the entry in Encyclopedia Britannica. According to that link, the population hasn’t changed much since Jacobs wrote his line.
By contrast, The 2020 edition of World Book has, as it's first entry the letter A. That’s right, just the single letter. In fact, every letter of the English alphabet in this edition of World Book starts with an entry for that letter.
Beyond A, the next entry is A.A. which is a redirect to Alcoholics Anonymous.
The first solid, non-letter or redirect entry is Aachen, pronounced “AH kuhn” which is the “westernmost city in Germany.”
On the other end of the spectrum, the last entry in the 2020 edition of World Book is Zygote which redirects to Fertilization. The entry before that–and therefore the last full entry in the 2020 edition of World Book is Zworykin, Vladimir Kosma, who “was a Russian-born American physicist and electronics engineer. He was responsible for many advances in radio, television, and the electron microscope.”