More specifically, "lexographically" means the ordering given by the Unicode values. Unicode assigns a integer value for each character. For letters, the Unicode values are in "alphabetical order" as described above. Unicode also specifies the ordering for punctuation marks and lower-case vs. upper-case letters.
I won't go into any more detail. If you are only using alphabetic characters, then
you should think of it as comparing their order alphabetically.
Also, you shouldn't worry about the exact value that is returned. Look at the javadocs and you will see that the important part is the sign of the return value. You should check whether this return value is positive, negative, or zero to determine whether one String is "less than", "greater than", or the "equal to" another String. So in your example, the -10 indicates that "hello" is "less than" (or comes before) "how".
Layne
[ January 12, 2006: Message edited by: Layne Lund ]
[ January 12, 2006: Message edited by: Layne Lund ]