How is Polish sort order different from plain ASCII?

In Polish each diacritic letter sorts immediately after its base letter, so the order runs a, ą, b, c, ć and so on. A plain code-point sort would push every accented letter to the very end after z, which is wrong for Polish.

Where do ą, ć, ł, ń and ż sit?

Right after their base letters: ą after a, ć after c, ł after l, ń after n, ó after o, ś after s, and both ź and ż after z. This matches the Polish CLDR collation used by dictionaries.

Does it handle mixed case?

Yes. The sort is locale-aware and treats upper and lower case of the same letter as equivalent for ordering, so Ala and ala stay together rather than being split by case.

What about numbers and symbols?

Lines that start with non-letters are still sorted, falling back to a deterministic order. Empty lines are dropped from the output.

No. Sorting uses your browser's built-in Polish collator (or a local fallback table), so your list never leaves the page.

Polish Alphabetical Sort

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Sorting Polish text correctly means putting each accented letter right after its base — a ą b c ć … — rather than dumping all the diacritics at the end as a naive sort would. This tool uses the Polish CLDR collation to order any list exactly the way a Polish dictionary would.

How it works

When available, the tool uses your browser’s Intl.Collator with the pl locale, which implements the official Polish tailoring. If that is missing, it falls back to a manual weight table built from the Polish alphabet order:

a ą b c ć d e ę f g h i j k l ł m n ń
o ó p q r s ś t u v w x y z ź ż

Each letter is mapped to a numeric weight, so łąka sorts after lampa (because ł follows l) but before mama. The comparison is case-insensitive for ordering purposes.

Example and notes

Given żaba, źrebak, ćma, ała, ala, łąka, lampa, the Polish order is ala, ała, ćma, lampa, łąka, źrebak, żaba. Note that ała follows ala (the ł outranks the plain l only at that position) and that ż comes last of all. Use descending mode to reverse the list while keeping the same letter ordering.