Why does ch sort after h instead of after c?

In the Czech alphabet ch is a distinct letter, not the letters c and h together. It has its own position in the sequence, right after h and before i. So chleba sorts after hora but before idol, which surprises people used to English sorting.

How are accented letters like á and č ordered?

Czech collation places accented vowels immediately after their base letter as a secondary difference, so a, á, then b. The consonant č, however, is its own primary letter sorting after c, and š after s, ž after z, because those carons mark separate letters.

Is this different from a plain JavaScript sort?

Yes. A default sort orders by Unicode code point, which scatters accented letters far from their base and treats ch as c-then-h. This tool uses the browser Intl Collator with the Czech locale to reproduce true dictionary order.

Is the sort case-sensitive?

By default it is case-insensitive at the primary level, matching dictionary convention where Brno and brno sort together. The underlying collator uses case only as a tie-breaker, so identical words differing only in case stay adjacent.

Does it handle uppercase CH and Ch?

Yes. The Czech locale collator recognises the ch digraph regardless of case, so CHrudim, Chleba, and chata all sort into the ch block after the h words, which is exactly what a Czech index expects.

Czech Alphabetical Sort

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Sorting Czech text correctly is harder than it looks because the digraph ch is a single letter of the alphabet, positioned after h and before i. Accented vowels also sort right next to their base letter rather than at the end of the table. A naive code-point sort gets both wrong.

How it works

The tool relies on the browser’s built-in Intl.Collator with the Czech locale, which encodes the official CLDR collation rules:

… g  h  ch  i  j …          (ch is one letter, after h)
a  á  b  c  č  d  ď  …       (accents are secondary; č, š, ž are own letters)

Each line of your input becomes a list entry, and the collator compares them pairwise so the final order matches a printed Czech dictionary or phone book. You can flip the direction to sort from Ž back to A.

Example and tips

Given hora, chata, idol, dům, the Czech order is dům, hora, chata, idol — note how chata lands between hora and idol, not next to cesta. Keep one item per line; leading and trailing spaces are trimmed before comparison. Because this uses the native locale engine, results match what Czech operating systems and databases produce with the cs_CZ collation.