Debian's American Sorting
![[a screenshot with a list of letters, A B C É C É C É C]](https://shallowsky.com/blog/images/screenshots/linux/dictsorting_unexpanded.jpg)
I was writing a little example of a GTK treeview for my scripts repository
when I noticed something rather funny about Debian's dictionaries.
My example uses /usr/share/dict/words as a handy source of data, just A through C since it turns out the TreeStore is rather slow in adding data. I expected top-level items of A, B, and C. What I got instead was: A, B, C, É, C, É, C, É, C.
What I got when I expanded the categories was even weirder: a bunch of éclairs mixed in with all my C words.
Was there something weird about my script? It didn't seem likely: I wasn't doing any sorting, just reading lines one by one from the file.
Sure enough, looking at /usr/share/dict/words confirmed what I was seeing:
laims Clair éclair Claire Claire's Clairol Clairol's Clair's éclair's éclairs clairvoyance clairvoyance's clairvoyantand several similar sections later on.
[ 11:44 Sep 13, 2026 More linux | permalink to this entry | ]
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