Sort the words

What it's for

It takes every word in the text, wherever it is, and lines them up alphabetically one after another. It helps whoever prepares vocabulary lists to study, whoever has to sort a list of names typed in a rush, and whoever wants to see at a glance which words a text contains without reading all of it: in alphabetical order duplicates end up side by side and stand out immediately.

What counts as «a word»

A word always starts with a letter and can carry on with letters, digits and apostrophes: that way «don't» and «mp3» stay whole. Accented letters count like all the others and the ordering puts them in the right place, because the comparison follows alphabet rules and not the characters' internal codes: «éclair» lands next to «eclipse», not at the very bottom.

As a result punctuation disappears and standalone numbers don't make it into the list: «12» and «3.50» don't start with a letter, so they're left out. That isn't an oversight: a vocabulary list with amounts and dates mixed in would be less useful, and there is a dedicated page for numbers.

The lines are lost, and that's on purpose

The result is a single text, with words separated by a space: the original split into lines is gone, because the words come from the whole text at once. If what you needed was to sort whole lines keeping them whole (a list of names, one per line), the right page is Sort lines. And if duplicates bother you, Unique words does the same sorting keeping one copy of each.

Nearby tools

To know how many times each word appears, instead of just seeing them in order, there is Word frequency. To shuffle them at random instead of sorting them Shuffle words, and to sort a list of numbers Sort numbers.