How does French sorting handle accents?

French collation treats é, è, ê, and e as the same letter at the primary level, so they interleave with plain e during alphabetical ordering. Accents only act as a tie-breaker at the secondary level when two words are otherwise identical.

DUCET is the Default Unicode Collation Element Table, the baseline ordering used by the Unicode Collation Algorithm. The French locale tailors it slightly, but the core rule of accent-insensitive primary comparison comes from this standard.

Why not just sort by character codes?

Sorting by raw code points puts all accented letters after z and scatters uppercase before lowercase, which is wrong for any human-facing French list. Locale collation orders é next to e and folds case as expected.

Does French sort accents from the end of the word?

Traditional French dictionary rules compared accents from the end of the word backwards. Modern CLDR and Unicode default to a forward secondary comparison, which is what this tool uses and what most software now applies.

French Alphabetical Sort

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Sorting French text correctly means accented letters such as é and è must interleave with plain e rather than being dumped after z. This tool uses the browser’s locale-aware collator with the French locale to order any list properly.

How it works

The Unicode Collation Algorithm compares strings at multiple levels:

Primary   – base letter only (a < b < c …); é, è, ê all equal e
Secondary – diacritics break ties (e < é < è)
Tertiary  – case breaks remaining ties (e < E)

Choosing sensitivity: "base" sorts ignoring accents and case, while sensitivity: "accent" keeps accents as a tie-breaker, and "variant" adds case sensitivity. The French locale (fr) supplies the correct letter weights.

Example and notes

A list of pêche, peche, pèche sorted accent-insensitively keeps them adjacent and ordered by their secondary accent weight, not scattered across the alphabet. For dictionary-style output choose the accent-sensitive mode; for search keys use the accent-insensitive base mode.