Word Sorter
Sort words alphabetically, by length, or by frequency — ascending or descending.
Input Words: 0Sorted Words: 0
How the word sorter works
Words are split on whitespace, then sorted according to the chosen mode. Alphabetical sorting uses locale-aware comparison. Length sorting places shortest or longest words first, with an alphabetical tiebreaker. Frequency sorting counts how many times each word appears in the input and sorts by that count. The "Remove duplicates" option keeps only the first occurrence of each word (case-insensitive).
For more detailed word analysis, see the Word Frequency Counter. To remove duplicate lines instead of words, try Duplicate Line Remover.
Built and maintained by Meet Shah · Last updated
What this tool is used for
- Alphabetising a word list for a glossary or an index.
- Sorting words by length to find the outliers.
- Ordering a term list by frequency to see what dominates.
- Deduplicating and sorting a keyword list in one pass.
- Preparing a word list for a puzzle or a game.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is alphabetical sorting just comparing characters?
- No, and that is the main pitfall. A byte comparison puts every uppercase letter before every lowercase one, so Zebra sorts before apple. True alphabetical order needs locale-aware collation via Intl.Collator.
- How does locale change the result?
- Materially. Swedish sorts å, ä and ö after z while German sorts them with a, o and u; Spanish once treated ch as one letter. There is no universally correct order, only correct for a given locale.
- How are duplicates handled?
- Kept by default — sorting reorders, it does not deduplicate. That is usually right, since removing duplicates loses the information that a word appeared more than once, which frequency analysis needs.
- What is a natural sort?
- Sorting embedded numbers by value rather than character, so item2 precedes item10. A plain string sort puts item10 first because '1' precedes '2' — the reason file listings so often look wrongly ordered.
- How is sorting by length different?
- It groups by word size rather than spelling, which is useful for puzzles, finding unusually long terms, and checking field widths. Ties are normally broken alphabetically so the output is deterministic.
- Should sorting be case-sensitive?
- Rarely, for words. A case-sensitive sort splits `Apple` and `apple` far apart, which is almost never what a reader wants — but a case-insensitive sort needs a tie-break, or equal words order unpredictably.
- How should hyphenated words be ordered?
- By convention, as if the hyphen were absent or a space — the choice changes where `well-known` lands relative to `wellness`. Dictionaries and indexes each pick one and state it, because the two orders genuinely differ.
Common errors and gotchas
- Sorting with an ASCII comparison, which misplaces accented and non-Latin words.
- Ignoring case inconsistently, so capitalised words cluster separately.
- Sorting words that were a phrase, which destroys the meaning rather than ordering it.
- Overlooking punctuation attached to words, which affects where they sort.
- Assuming length sorting is stable, so equal-length words come out in an arbitrary order.
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