How to alphabetize a list online
Alphabetizing puts items in dictionary order, A to Z. Paste your list with one item per line, choose A–Z, and copy the result. For the reverse, choose Z–A. Every line is treated as one item, so "Smith, John" is sorted by its first letter, S.
The sort options
| Option | What it does | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| A–Z | Ascending alphabetical order | Names, glossaries, reference lists |
| Z–A | Descending alphabetical order | Reverse leaderboards, descending lists |
| Shuffle | Random order each time | Draws, quiz questions, presentation order |
| Shortest first / longest first | Sorts by number of characters | Titles, slogans and headlines against limits |
| Natural | Reads numbers by value | File names, chapters, "Step 2" before "Step 10" |
| Reverse | Flips the current order | Undoing or inverting a list |
Alphabetizing a bibliography
Reference lists in APA 7, MLA 9 and Harvard are ordered by the first author's surname. If each entry starts with the surname, the tool will order them correctly. Check three things afterwards: entries that start with "A", "An" or "The" are normally ordered by the next word in APA, so move those yourself; works by the same author follow the style guide's own rule; and entries wrapped over two lines should be joined into one line first. Our Citation Generator produces formatted entries you can sort here.
How capitals, accents and numbers are handled
The sort uses the browser's collator for your text language, with letter case ignored. Accented letters are placed beside their base letters, which is how English dictionaries treat "café" and "résumé". Punctuation and spaces at the start of a line can change the order, so remove leading symbols first with the Text Cleaner.
Limits
The tool sorts whole lines only and does not sort words inside a line or columns in a table. Shuffle gives a different order each run. Sorting is not a deduplicator: repeated lines stay, so use Remove Duplicate Lines as well when you need a unique list.