Alphabetize List: Sort Lines A to Z

About this tool

Sorting a list by hand is slow and easy to get wrong, and spreadsheet sorting drags in columns, headers and formatting you don't want. This sorter works on plain lines of text: paste a list, pick an order, and copy the result. It runs entirely in your browser, so a customer list, a set of keywords or a pile of file names never leaves your device.

How to use the Text Sorter

1. Paste your list with one item per line. Copying a single column out of a spreadsheet gives you exactly that.
2. Choose a sort order. Alphabetical is the usual choice; natural order is better for anything with numbers inside it.
3. Set the clean-up options — ignore case, drop blank lines, trim stray spaces, remove duplicates, or ignore a leading "The", "A" or "An".
4. Click Sort lines, then copy the result or download it as a .txt file.

The sort orders, explained

• Alphabetical (A → Z / Z → A) uses your browser's language-aware comparison rather than raw character codes. That means "apple" and "Apple" sit next to each other instead of every capitalised word jumping to the top, and accented letters such as "é" sort alongside "e".
• Natural order compares runs of digits as whole numbers, so "file2" comes before "file10". Plain alphabetical sorting reads digits one character at a time and would put "file10" first, because "1" comes before "2".
• Numeric value sorts by the first number found in each line, including negatives and decimals, so "-3 °C", "4.5 kg" and "12 items" line up by value. Lines with no number at all are kept at the end in their original order.
• Length sorts by the number of characters in each line, shortest or longest first. It's handy for spotting unusually long entries, or for ordering a list of tags or keywords by size.
• Reverse flips the list upside down without sorting it, and Random shuffle puts it in a random order using the browser's cryptographic random number generator, so every ordering is equally likely.

Every sort is stable: when two lines compare as equal (for example "Apple" and "apple" with Ignore case on), they stay in the order you pasted them.

Worked example

Say you paste these five file names: file10.txt, File1.txt, file2.txt, file1.txt and a blank line. With Alphabetical and Ignore case on, the blank line is dropped and you get File1.txt, file1.txt, file10.txt, file2.txt — "file10" lands before "file2", which is rarely what you want. Switch to Natural order and the result becomes File1.txt, file1.txt, file2.txt, file10.txt. Tick Remove duplicates as well and, because case is being ignored, file1.txt is treated as a repeat of File1.txt and removed, leaving three lines. The first spelling you pasted is the one that's kept.

Ignoring "The", "A" and "An"

Libraries and music apps file "The Beatles" under B, not T. Tick Ignore leading "The", "A", "An" and the sorter does the same: it skips one leading article (followed by a space) when comparing lines, but leaves the text itself untouched, so "The Beatles" still appears exactly as you typed it — just in the B section. This only applies to English articles at the very start of a line.

Common use cases

• Alphabetising a guest list, glossary, bibliography or table of contents
• Putting numbered file names, invoice IDs or version numbers into the right order
• Cleaning and de-duplicating a keyword or tag list before importing it somewhere
• Shuffling names for a random draw, running order or seating plan

Things to watch out for

The sorter treats each line as one item, so a list separated by commas needs to be split onto separate lines first — the Find & Replace tool can swap ", " for a line break. Numeric sorting only looks at the first number in a line, so "Room 2, floor 10" sorts as 2. And "Remove duplicates" means an exact match after trimming and case options are applied; two entries that mean the same thing but are spelled differently won't be merged. If de-duplication is all you need, the Duplicate Line Remover keeps your original order instead of sorting.

Why "Zebra" can sort before "apple" in other tools

Computers store each character as a number (its Unicode code point), and the simplest sort just compares those numbers. Capital letters A to Z are 65 to 90 and lowercase a to z are 97 to 122, so a plain code-point sort puts every capitalized word first: Zebra, apple, banana. Accented letters have even higher numbers, so Éclair ends up after banana. Digits (48 to 57) come before letters, and they are compared one at a time, so 10 items sorts before 9 items.

This sorter uses the browser's Intl.Collator, the language-aware comparison defined in the ECMAScript Internationalization API, which gives apple, banana, Éclair, Zebra. Natural order turns on the collator's numeric option, so runs of digits compare as whole numbers.

Number formats in numeric sort

Numeric value sorting reads the first number in each line and understands minus signs, decimal points and comma thousands separators, so 1,200.50 is read as 1200.5. Two formats don't work as expected:

• Decimal commas, as in 3,5 kg, are read as 3 because the comma isn't followed by three digits. Swap the commas for points with Find and Replace first.
• Dates such as 12/03/2026 are read as their first number, 12. Write dates as YYYY-MM-DD, and plain alphabetical order will sort them chronologically.

Doing the same on the command line

If you work in a terminal, GNU sort covers most of these modes:

• sort -f: ignore case
• sort -n: numeric value (the number must be at the start of the line)
• sort -V: version or natural order, so file2 comes before file10
• sort -r: reverse the order
• sort -u: remove duplicate lines while sorting
• sort -R: shuffle by a random hash. Unlike this tool's shuffle, identical lines stay grouped together.

GNU sort is also locale-aware; run it as LC_ALL=C sort to get the plain code-point order described above. To remove repeats without changing the order, use the Duplicate Line Remover.