Alphabetical Order Tool

Alphabetising by hand gets slow once a list passes a dozen entries. The tool sorts as soon as you paste.

1. Paste your list into the Input box.
2. Set Items are to One per line or Separated by spaces or commas, so the tool knows where each entry ends.
3. Choose the Order: A to Z or Z to A.
4. Adjust the three tick boxes: Ignore case (on by default), Remove duplicates (off) and Natural number order (on).
5. Read the result in the Sorted list box, then press Copy or Download .txt.

For example, the lines pear, apple and mango come out as apple, mango, pear.

The second setting matters when your list is a single line. Pasting pear, apple; mango banana with Items are set to the spaces or commas option and the order set to Z to A returns pear, mango, banana, apple, one per line. With One per line selected instead, the whole line would be treated as a single item and nothing would appear to sort. If a sort looks as though it did nothing, check this setting first.

The tool compares text with your browser's language-aware collation, not raw character codes. That avoids the classic surprise in which every capital letter sorts before every lowercase one.

• Ignore case on. Capital and lowercase letters count as equal, and accents are ignored when comparing too. Entries that compare as equal, such as Eclair and Éclair, stay in the order you entered them.
• Ignore case off. Case and accents now break ties, with lowercase before uppercase. apple comes before Apple, and Zebra still follows banana.
• Natural number order. Digits are read as numbers, so item1, item2, item10 come out in that order instead of item1, item10, item2.
• Remove duplicates. The first copy is kept. With Ignore case on, Apple, apple and APPLE collapse to Apple.
• Z to A. This simply reverses the A to Z result.

As a worked case, the list banana, Apple, cherry, Zebra, apple gives Apple, apple, banana, cherry, Zebra with the defaults, and apple, Apple, banana, cherry, Zebra with Ignore case off. The order of accented and special letters follows your browser language, so a reader whose browser is set to Swedish may see å, ä and ö placed after z, as that language expects, while an English setting places them beside a and o.

Natural number order only concerns digits inside text. It does not understand minus signs or decimal points, so -5 and 2.5 are compared as pieces of text. It also treats each run of digits separately, which is why a list such as chapter 1.10 and chapter 1.9 sorts the 9 before the 10. For genuine decimal sorting, switch to the number sorter.

When Items are is set to spaces or commas, the tool splits at spaces, commas and semicolons. Either way the output is one item per line, so a comma-separated list comes back as a column. To rebuild a comma list, use the find and replace tool with Regular expression on, finding \n and replacing with a comma and a space. Blank lines and spaces around entries are dropped.

• Sorting by surname. Write each name as Last, First with One per line selected. The words setting would split the name at the comma.
• Articles and prefixes. The tool compares from the first character, so The Hobbit sorts under T, and bullets or numbering count as characters.
• Teachers and students. Spelling lists, vocabulary, glossaries and reference lists are quick to arrange.
• Admin and developers. Tags, file names, configuration keys and imports.

Negative signs and decimal points are not treated as numbers here. For a list of pure numbers, use the number sorter. To remove repeated entries without sorting, use the duplicate line remover, and to flip a finished list use the reverse text generator.