Tamil Alphabetical Order

The Letter Order Used Here

Dictionary mode follows the vowel and consonant sequence below. It compares letters from left to right; if the shared letters are equal, the shorter word comes first. Within a consonant family it puts the pulli form before the inherent-a form, then follows the twelve vowel positions. This is a written-letter comparison rather than a sort by raw Unicode numbers.

Tamil Virtual Academy’s introductory textbook lists the vowel and consonant sequence used here. The Tamil Nadu government’s published encoding report also includes a Tamil collation sequence, while Unicode’s CLDR resources describe language-specific collation. Unicode explicitly warns that code chart position is not alphabetical order. That distinction matters for letters such as ழ, ள, ற and ன, whose encoded values are not the order shown here.

This tool places the additional letters after the eighteen Tamil consonant families. It treats conjuncts as sequences of their component letters: for example, க்ஷ is compared as க் followed by ஷ. Non-Tamil runs use the Tamil collator for comparison and sort before Tamil letters in Dictionary mode. These are explicit tool choices for predictable mixed lists.

Clean a List Without Losing the Original

1. Paste one complete entry on each line. A comma inside an entry stays part of it; commas do not split the list.
2. Leave Trim Spaces enabled to remove accidental leading and trailing whitespace. Blank lines are omitted in both modes.
3. Choose Remove Duplicates if each normalised entry should appear once. Ignore English Case also makes Latin case variants duplicates.
4. Choose Reverse for descending order or Group by First Letter for labelled groups. Copy the sorted result when it looks right.

The tool normalises to NFC before sorting. For example, a precomposed Tamil vowel sign and its canonically equivalent decomposed sequence receive the same representation. This is not spelling correction: similar-sounding letters, punctuation, extra internal spaces and alternate spellings remain distinct. Review names before deduplicating a contact or attendance list.

Natural Numbers handles embedded digit runs as numbers. With it on, item2 precedes item10; with it off, the digits are compared as text. Equal sort keys retain input order. To sort by a surname or a field after a tab, rearrange the entries first: this tool compares the whole line, not an inferred personal-name structure.

Browser Tamil, Word and Excel

Browser Tamil mode calls Intl.Collator('ta'). Its exact behaviour depends on the locale data available in the browser. At startup this tool compares the entire reference sequence with that collator and reports a match or difference below the controls. Dictionary mode applies the displayed Tamil sequence explicitly, while retaining collator handling for numeric and non-Tamil runs.

In desktop Word, select the list and choose Home, Sort, Paragraphs and Text. Word’s sort options include a sort language; select Tamil where available, then check the result against a short reference list. Microsoft notes that alphabetical list sorting requires desktop Word rather than Word for the web.

For Excel, Microsoft documents that sort orders vary with locale and advises checking regional settings. Its documentation does not establish a universal absence of Tamil sorting, so do not assume every Excel version behaves alike. If its result differs from the sequence you need, sort the one-column list here and paste the result back. Keep associated columns together: sorting only names separately from phone numbers or marks would break the row relationships.