Word Sorter

What Is a Word Sorter?

A word sorter is a tool that rearranges words according to a selected order. You can use the Word Sorter above to organize words alphabetically, reverse alphabetical order, by length, or by how frequently each word appears.

Paste a list, paragraph, article, or other text into the input box and the sorted results appear automatically. You can also remove duplicate words, ignore capitalization, and choose how the sorted words are displayed.

If you only need the total number of words in your text, use our Word Counter. For broader statistics about characters and words, use the main Character Counter.

How to Sort Words

To sort a list of words:

1. Type or paste your words into the input box above.
2. Choose how you want the words sorted, such as A–Z, Z–A, shortest first, longest first, most frequent, or least frequent.
3. Choose whether capitalization should be ignored, duplicate words should be removed, or surrounding punctuation should be removed.
4. Choose whether the results should appear one word per line, separated by spaces, or separated by commas.
5. Copy the sorted results when you are finished.

The results update automatically whenever you edit the input or change a sorting option, so there is no need to click a separate Sort button.

Sort Words Alphabetically

Select A–Z to arrange words in alphabetical order. Words beginning with A appear first, followed by B, C, and the rest of the alphabet.

For example, the words pear, apple, banana, orange become apple, banana, orange, pear when sorted from A to Z.

Alphabetical sorting can be useful for vocabulary lists, names, keywords, tags, study materials, indexes, and other collections of words that are easier to review when organized alphabetically.

Sort Words from Z to A

Select Z–A to reverse the alphabetical order. Words beginning with letters near the end of the alphabet appear first, while words beginning with A appear near the end.

This can be useful when you want to inspect a list from the opposite direction without manually reversing an alphabetical list.

Sort Words by Length

The Shortest First option arranges words according to their number of characters, beginning with the shortest words. Longest First does the opposite and places the longest words at the top.

Sorting by length can make it easier to compare vocabulary, find unusually long words, inspect short words, or organize a word list according to size.

The metrics below the sorter also show the longest word, shortest word, and average word length in your text. For more detailed word-length information, use our Average Word Length Calculator.

Sort Words by Frequency

Select Most Frequent to place words that occur most often first. Select Least Frequent to begin with words that occur the fewest times.

Frequency sorting can be helpful when reviewing repeated vocabulary, keywords, writing patterns, or large pieces of text.

If you want to see the exact number of occurrences for every word rather than simply sorting them by frequency, use our Word Frequency Counter.

If you are interested in only one particular word, our Specific Word Counter shows how many times that word appears in your text.

Keep Words in Their Original Order

Select Original Order when you want to keep words in the same sequence in which they appear in the original text while still applying options such as removing duplicates or surrounding punctuation.

This is particularly useful when you want to create a cleaned word list without alphabetizing or otherwise rearranging the words.

Remove Duplicate Words

Enable Remove duplicate words to keep only one instance of each word in the sorted results. Repeated words will be removed from the output.

For example, a list containing apple banana apple orange banana can be reduced to apple banana orange.

If you want to examine unique vocabulary in more detail, use our Unique Word Counter.

Ignore Capitalization When Sorting

The Ignore capitalization option is enabled by default. This allows words such as Apple, apple, and APPLE to be compared according to their letters rather than treating uppercase and lowercase versions as completely separate positions in the sort order.

Turn this option off when capitalization is meaningful to your list and you want uppercase and lowercase forms handled separately.

Remove Punctuation from Words

The Remove surrounding punctuation option removes punctuation attached to the beginning or end of words before they are sorted.

For example, "apple," can be treated as apple rather than as a separate value simply because it appears next to a comma or quotation mark.

Punctuation that forms part of a word, such as an apostrophe or hyphen inside a word, can remain part of the word rather than being treated like punctuation surrounding it.

Choose How Sorted Words Are Displayed

The sorted results can be displayed in three formats:

• One word per line places every word on its own line.
• Space separated places the sorted words on continuous lines separated by spaces.
• Comma separated creates a comma-separated word list.

Space separated is the default output format. If you are working with text that is already organized into separate lines, our Line Counter can count and analyze those lines individually.

How Are Words Counted?

The Words metric shows the total number of words detected in the input. Unique Words shows how many different words appear, while Characters shows the total character count of the original text.

These statistics give you a quick overview while you organize your word list. For additional word statistics, use our Word Counter.

Common Uses for a Word Sorter

A word sorter can be useful anywhere a list of words needs to be reorganized. Common uses include:

• Alphabetizing vocabulary and spelling lists.
• Organizing keywords or tags.
• Finding the longest or shortest words in a passage.
• Reviewing frequently repeated words.
• Removing duplicate entries from a word list.
• Preparing lists for spreadsheets or documents.
• Creating comma-separated or line-separated lists.
• Cleaning copied text before further analysis.

Related Word Tools

You may also find these CharacterCounter.com tools useful when working with words and text:

• Character Counter — count characters, words, sentences, spaces, and more.
• Word Counter — count words and view additional text statistics.
• Word Frequency Counter — see how often every word appears.
• Unique Word Counter — count and analyze the different words in your text.
• Specific Word Counter — count occurrences of one particular word.
• Average Word Length Calculator — calculate the average length of words in your text.
• Line Counter — count and analyze individual lines of text.

You can also browse our full collection of text tools.