Where do å, ä, and ö sort in Finnish?

At the very end of the alphabet, after z, in the order å, ä, ö. So öljy sorts after zeniitti, and ähky sorts after a word starting with y. This differs from plain Unicode order, where a-umlaut would fall right after a.

How is this different from German sorting?

German typically treats a-umlaut as equivalent to a (or ae), so it sorts near a. Finnish and Swedish instead give ä and ö their own positions at the end of the alphabet, which changes the order of any list containing them.

What does the v and w toggle do?

Traditionally Finnish collates w as a variant of v, so words spelled with w interleave with v-words rather than sorting after them. Turn the toggle on for that classic dictionary behaviour, or leave it off to treat w as its own letter after v.

Does case or accent affect the order?

No. Sorting is case-insensitive and based on the Finnish letter positions, so Älä and älä sort to the same place. Ties on the comparison key fall back to a stable order so the result is deterministic.

Is my list uploaded anywhere?

No. All sorting happens locally in your browser. Your words never leave your device, so the tool is safe for private or unpublished lists.

Finnish Alphabetical Sort

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This tool sorts Finnish words into proper Finnish alphabetical order, which places the special letters at the end of the alphabet rather than near their base letters.

How it works

Finnish (like Swedish) extends the Latin alphabet and orders it like this:

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z å ä ö

The tool builds a numeric sort key for each word by mapping every letter to its position in that sequence, so å, ä, and ö rank just past z. It then compares words key by key. Because the special letters are handled explicitly, öljy correctly sorts after zeniitti, which a naive Unicode or ASCII sort gets wrong by placing ä next to a.

Example

Sorting öljy, ananas, voi, zeniitti, ähky, yö yields ananas, voi, yö, zeniitti, ähky, öljy — the three special letters land at the end in å-ä-ö order.

Tips and notes

Turn on the v/w toggle for the traditional convention where w is collated as a variant of v, common in older dictionaries and many Finnish names. Sorting is case- and accent-insensitive on the base comparison and uses a stable tie-break, so results are deterministic. To understand why these letters sit at the end, see the Finnish alphabet reference.