Alphabetize List Online - Sort A to Z Free

Frequently asked questions

How are capitals and lowercase ordered?

A plain sort places all capitals before lowercase, because it compares character codes — so 'Zebra' lands before 'apple'. Normalise the case first if you want a human-style alphabetical order.

Why do my numbered items sort in a strange order?

Because a text sort compares character by character, putting 'item10' before 'item2' — the '1' sorts before the '2'. Use numeric sorting, or zero-pad the numbers, to get the expected sequence.

How are accented characters handled?

They sort by their underlying character codes, which places them after unaccented Latin letters rather than alongside them. Languages with their own alphabetical conventions may not order as a native speaker expects.

Pro tips

Trim whitespace before deduplicating. A trailing space is invisible and makes an otherwise identical line survive as a separate entry.
Decide whether case matters for your data before running it — collapsing case on identifiers can merge two genuinely different records.
Sort before deduplicating when you want to eyeball the result; identical entries end up adjacent and the removals are easy to verify.
Use natural ordering for anything with numbers in it, or item10 files before item2 and version lists come out nonsensical.
Keep the original list until you have checked the count. A dedupe that removed far more than you expected usually means case or whitespace handling was not what you assumed.

About Line Sorter & Deduplicator

Sorts alphabetically or by length, strips duplicates and blank lines, trims stray whitespace, and reverses or shuffles order, with case sensitivity as a toggle. The usual reason to reach for it is a list pasted out of a spreadsheet or a log.

Sort any list alphabetically A–Z or Z–A with natural, numeric-aware ordering, and dedupe or shuffle it in the same pass. It all runs in your browser.

Paste a list and this tool reorders it any way you need: alphabetically A→Z or Z→A, by line length, reversed, or randomly shuffled. In the same pass it can remove duplicate lines, drop empty lines and trim stray whitespace, with an optional case-insensitive mode so 'Apple' and 'apple' are treated as the same entry.

It is the fast way to clean a keyword list, tidy a CSV column, dedupe an email or URL list, or randomise names for a draw. Sorting uses natural ordering, so 'item2' comes before 'item10' rather than after it.

Sorting by raw character codes is not alphabetical order, and the difference shows immediately. Byte order puts every capital letter before every lowercase one, so Zebra lands before apple — correct by code point and wrong by any human expectation. Proper alphabetical ordering is locale-aware, and the right answer genuinely differs by language: Swedish places å, ä and ö after z, while German files them alongside a and o. There is no single universal ordering to fall back on.

Deduplication needs the same care about what counts as identical. Whether entries differing only in case are duplicates depends entirely on the data — for email addresses usually yes, for case-sensitive identifiers usually no. Trailing whitespace is the quieter culprit: two lines that look the same but differ by one invisible space are distinct strings, and both survive a dedupe that would otherwise have caught them.

Common use cases

Alphabetising a bibliography, glossary or index
Ordering a name or attendee list before sharing it
Sorting config keys or CSV headers to make a diff readable

How it comparesSpreadsheets can do all of this through Remove Duplicates and a sort, across several dialogs and a column selection. Command-line sort and uniq are faster still if the data is already in a file and you remember that uniq only collapses adjacent lines. Pasting a list is quicker than either when it came out of an email.