Turkish has a 29-letter alphabet with several letters that a plain English or ASCII sort handles wrong: ç, ğ, ı, ö, ş, and ü. This tool sorts your list using the real Turkish alphabet order, so words land where a Turkish dictionary would put them.
How it works
The Turkish alphabet order is fixed:
a b c ç d e f g ğ h ı i j k l m n o ö p r s ş t u ü v y z
The tool assigns each letter a rank from this sequence and compares words letter by letter on those ranks rather than on Unicode code points. The two critical differences from a generic sort are:
- ç, ğ, ş, ö, ü are interleaved, not dumped after z. For example ç sorts immediately after c, before d.
- ı and i are distinct letters, with dotless ı sorting before dotted i. Casing is normalised the Turkish way so that İ pairs with i and I pairs with ı.
Characters not in the Turkish alphabet (digits, punctuation, Latin q/w/x) are given a rank after all Turkish letters so they sort to the end consistently.
Tips and example
- Input
zeytin, çay, armut, ışık, incirsorts toarmut, çay, incir, ışık, zeytin— note ç right after a-words and ı before i. - Sorting is stable for equal keys, so two identical words keep their input order.
- Use descending mode to reverse the Turkish order rather than just reversing an English sort, which would otherwise misplace the accented letters again.