Reverse word order

What it's for

Line by line, the words are put back from last to first: «the cat sleeps on the sofa» becomes «sofa the on sleeps cat the». It's used for word games and puzzles, for preparing reading and word-order exercises at school, and for a practical case that comes up more often than you'd think: a list where the piece you care about sits at the end of the line («Smith John 12/03 Manchester») and you want it at the front so you can sort by it.

How it treats spaces

The letters of each word stay intact: the order is reversed, not the spelling. What does change are the spaces: every line is tidied up, runs of spaces become a single one, tabs become spaces and the indent at the start disappears. That's unavoidable, because the first space becomes the last one, but it means a text laid out in columns loses its columns. Empty lines stay empty and the number of lines never changes.

This is not «writing backwards»

They are two different things that often get mixed up. Here the word order is reversed and every word stays readable; writing backwards means reversing the characters, and then «sofa» becomes «afos». If that's what you were after, the right place is Reverse text.

Nearby tools

To put the lines back from last to first, instead of the words inside a line, there is Reverse the lines. To sort them alphabetically Sort lines, and to shuffle the words at random instead of reversing them Shuffle words.