The English Alphabetical Sort tool orders a list of words or lines using proper locale collation rather than raw byte comparison. It relies on the browser’s built-in Intl.Collator, so accented letters, mixed case and punctuation sort the way a dictionary would, with options for ascending/descending order, case sensitivity, deduplication and locale.
How it works
Naive sorting compares character codes, which puts every uppercase letter before every lowercase one (Zoo before apple) and scatters accented letters to the end. Collation fixes this. Intl.Collator(locale, options) produces a comparison function that follows the Unicode Collation Algorithm:
- sensitivity: “base” ignores case and accents (a = A = á)
- sensitivity: “accent” ignores case but distinguishes accents (a = A, but a ≠ á)
- sensitivity: “variant” distinguishes both case and accents
Choosing en-US or en-GB selects the locale tailoring; for plain English the difference is small, but the option keeps behaviour explicit. Descending order simply reverses the comparison. Optional deduplication collapses repeated lines using the same sensitivity you chose for sorting.
Tips
- Use case-insensitive sorting for human-readable lists like names or vocabulary.
- Turn on dedupe to clean up lists exported from spreadsheets.
- Sorting is stable here: items that compare as equal keep their original relative order.
Everything runs locally in your browser using the standard Intl API — your list is never uploaded.