Line Sorter (A-Z)
A guest list, a directory of team members, a spreadsheet export of product names — most raw lists arrive in whatever order they were entered, not alphabetical order. Sorting a short list by hand is manageable; sorting eighty or a hundred lines by eye means missing a few and re-checking twice. This tool takes any pasted list and arranges it alphabetically in one click, A-Z or reversed Z-A.
What "alphabetical" means for this tool
Sorting compares lines the way a dictionary would — character by character from the start of each line. Capital and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols each have their own position in that ordering, which is why a line starting with a number can land in an unexpected spot relative to lines starting with letters. This is standard "lexicographic" sorting, the same method spreadsheet software uses by default on text columns.
Practical situations this comes up in
An HR coordinator preparing an alphabetical attendee list for a company event from a messy sign-up form export. A store manager alphabetizing a product catalog list before printing a price sheet. A teacher sorting a class roster copied from an email into alphabetical order for a seating chart or grade book. A researcher organizing a list of citation authors or keywords into alphabetical order to match a required formatting style.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does it remove blank lines? Yes — empty lines are automatically dropped before sorting, so you don't end up with stray gaps scattered through the result.
Will it sort numbers the way I'd expect (2, 10, 20)? Not necessarily — since sorting is character-by-character text comparison rather than numeric comparison, "10" can be placed before "2" because the character "1" comes before "2". For a list that's purely numbers needing true numeric order, a spreadsheet's numeric sort is the better tool.
Does capitalization affect the sort order? Yes, uppercase and lowercase versions of the same letter are treated as different characters in strict lexicographic sorting, which can occasionally group all-caps entries separately from lowercase ones.