How to Alphabetize a Works Cited Page in MLA 9

To alphabetize works cited entries in MLA 9, sort every entry by the first thing in it, which is usually the author's surname and otherwise the title, and compare letter by letter. Entries that start with a name and entries that start with a title go into one list, not two. Most lists are done at that point. The rest of this guide covers the entries that are not: five works by one author, a title that opens with "The" or "1984," a surname that starts with Mc or van der, a tweet from an @ handle, and the places where a citation generator, ours included, puts an entry in the wrong slot.

The MLA 9 rule for alphabetizing works cited

Three sentences from the MLA Handbook (9th ed., 2021) and the MLA's own Style Center settle almost everything.

First, entries are alphabetized by the first item in the entry. Purdue OWL's MLA 9 Works Cited page puts it as "Entries are alphabetized by the first item in the citation (usually the author's last name)," and works with no known author go in by title.

Second, the comparison runs letter by letter. The MLA follows the letter-by-letter system from The Chicago Manual of Style, as the Style Center explains in its answer on ordering an encyclopedia entry titled "Christie, Agatha". Under that system you read each heading as one continuous string of letters until you reach a comma or a parenthesis, so spaces and hyphens inside a surname do not count.

Third, titles skip an opening article. Titles are alphabetized "letter by letter, ignoring any initial A, An, or The or the equivalent in other languages," and the article stays in the printed entry (MLA Style Center).

Several Style Center answers linked in this guide were written for the eighth edition and now carry a note pointing to the ninth for current guidance. The core rules in this section also appear in Purdue OWL's MLA 9 guide.

Put together, a short list sorts like this:

Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. Scholastic, 2008. The Hunger Games. Directed by Gary Ross, Lionsgate, 2012. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Knopf, 1987. Orwell, George. Animal Farm. Secker and Warburg, 1945.

The 2012 film has no author element here, so it begins with its title. It sorts under H for "Hunger," between Collins and Morrison, even though the printed entry starts with "The." That one entry is where most hand-sorted lists and most automatic sorts go wrong.

Format the page itself before you sort: "Works Cited" centered at the top, double spacing throughout, and a hanging indent of half an inch. Our MLA 9 Works Cited formatting guide covers the layout; this guide is only about order.

Worked examples

Each example below shows the order MLA 9 produces and the reason. Where only the sort is at issue, the entries are trimmed to the author and title so the order is easy to see.

1. Different surnames

The base case needs no thought. Barker before Barnes, because K comes before N at the fourth letter. Compare until two letters differ, and ignore case.

Barker, Pat. Regeneration. Barnes, Julian. Flaubert's Parrot. Barnett, Correlli. The Desert Generals.

2. Two authors with the same surname

When surnames match, the given name breaks the tie. Smith, David comes before Smith, Rachel. If the given names also match, the title decides. In the paper, add the first initial to each in-text citation, (D. Smith 45) and (R. Smith 112), so readers can tell the two apart.

3. Several works by the same author

List one author's works alphabetically by title, skipping A, An, and The, and replace the name with three hyphens and a period in every entry after the first:

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Knopf, 1987. ---. The Bluest Eye. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. ---. Song of Solomon. Knopf, 1977. ---. Sula. Knopf, 1973.

The Bluest Eye sorts as "Bluest Eye," which puts it right after Beloved. Publication year plays no part in MLA's same-author order, which is the opposite of APA. Students who learned APA first often stack these by date out of habit.

The three hyphens are a substitution allowed by the ninth edition: "three em dashes or three hyphens can take the place of identical names in consecutive works-cited-list entries" (sec. 5.126). On 10 June 2026 the MLA announced that future editions will drop the dashes because screen readers handle them badly, and will repeat names in full instead. Until a new edition ships, MLA 9 permits either. If your instructor has not said, three hyphens are still correct, and repeating the full name is the safer choice for anything that will be read aloud by assistive software.

4. The same author alone and with co-authors

When one person appears as a sole author and also as the first of a group, the solo entries come first (Purdue OWL, MLA 9). The co-authored entries follow, and their names are written out because the authorship is no longer identical.

Dorris, Michael. The Broken Cord. ---. A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. Dorris, Michael, and Louise Erdrich. The Crown of Columbus.

Three hyphens stand in only for exactly the same names in exactly the same order as the entry above. A second book by Dorris and Erdrich could take three hyphens after this entry. A book credited to Erdrich and Dorris, in that order, sorts under E and is written out in full.

5. The same lead author with different co-authors

A work by three or more authors is listed under the first author followed by et al. When you have several of those with different collaborators, you cannot shorten any of them. The MLA's example (same author, different coauthors) repeats the name in every entry and orders them by title:

Taylor, Sandy, et al. "Collaboration in the Twenty-First Century." Taylor, Sandy, et al. "Cowriting Papers." Taylor, Sandy, et al. "Groups at Work."

The in-text citations then need a short title to tell them apart: (Taylor et al., "Collaboration") and (Taylor et al., "Cowriting").

6. A title that starts with a number

Treat the number as if it were spelled out. In the MLA's own examples, 1984 is alphabetized as Nineteen Eighty-Four and "2 + 2 = 5" as "Two plus Two Equals Five" (MLA Style Center). Numerals do not jump to the top of the list, which is what a spreadsheet sort or Word's A-Z button will do to them.

Inside a same-author stack this matters too. Orwell's novel printed as 1984 files after Animal Farm, because N follows A:

Orwell, George. Animal Farm. ---. 1984.

7. Mc, Mac, and M'

Letter by letter means you sort the name as it is spelled. MacArthur comes before McAdams, because the second letter, a, precedes c. Some older indexes file Mc as if it were spelled Mac. Letter-by-letter sorting does not.

MacArthur, Ann. Mackey, Lewis. McAdams, Dan. Meyer, Nina.

8. An entry that starts with a symbol

Ignore symbols, including @ and #, and start from the first letter (MLA Style Center). In the MLA's example, an entry for the Associated Press account "@AP" files under A, and two entries whose titles begin "#MeToo" file under M. For a list of tweets, the same rule applies to handles: @humcommons comes before @mlastyle.

Special cases

No author: the entry starts with the title

Begin with the title and sort it by its first word after any opening article. Interfile it with the name entries: an untitled-author report called "Climate Policy Review" goes between Clarke and Cobb, not in a separate block at the end.

An organization that wrote and also published a work is a common source of no-author entries. Begin that entry with the title and give the organization only as publisher (MLA Style Center), so the entry sorts by title. When a division or committee wrote it and the parent organization published it, the division goes in the author slot and the entry sorts under the division's name.

A name and a title that start with the same word

This is the edge case that letter-by-letter sorting exists for. When entries begin with the same word, the MLA orders them like this: the word alone, then the word followed by a parenthesis, then the word followed by a comma (sorted by what follows the comma), then the word followed by a space or other punctuation and another word. A colon is ignored. The Style Center's example list (alphabetizing encyclopedia entries):

"London." LONDON (Ladies of North Dakota or Nebraska). London, Jack. "London, Place of Mind." London, Stewart. "London Forever." "London: New Troy."

The same post settles the Christie question. If you cite two of Agatha Christie's novels and an encyclopedia article titled "Christie, Agatha (1890-1979)," the article goes after the novels, because a bare name sorts ahead of a name followed by a parenthesis. If the article's title is just "Christie, Agatha," either order is acceptable.

Surnames with particles: van der, de, al-

Particles depend on the language of the name, and MLA follows each language's convention. For Dutch names, alphabetize by the main part of the surname and put the lowercase particle after the given name (MLA Style Center):

Berg, Joost van der. Ee, Elsa van, and Rolf J. Kleber. Vries, Kaatje de.

The in-text citation has to match the works-cited form exactly, so a work by Elsa van Ee and Rolf Kleber is cited as (Ee and Kleber 642). The MLA applies the same treatment to the Arabic particles al- and el-, which move after the given name, unless the author prefers to be listed under the particle; then the entry begins "Al-" and files under A (MLA Style Center).

Irish surnames work the other way: the MLA's recommendation is to keep the prefix as part of the sorting name. Mac, Fitz, Ó, Mhic, Nic, and Uí all count, so "Ó Corráin, Donnchadh" files under O and "Uí Chollatáin, Regina" under U (MLA Style Center).

Two editions of the same work

Cite two editions of one novel and you need a tiebreaker below the title. The MLA's answer (ordering editions) is to order the entries by the most important unique detail, usually the date. Oldest-first and newest-first are both acceptable as long as you use one direction throughout the list. If two editions share a year, sort by the next unique detail, such as an editor's or translator's surname or the publisher.

London, Jack. Martin Eden. Macmillan, 1915. ---. Martin Eden. Penguin, 1984. ---. Martin Eden. Modern Library, 2002.

Letters by one author to different people

Letters by the same writer go in order of the recipients' names (MLA Style Center), so a writer's letter to Ezra Pound comes before the same writer's letter to John Quinn, whatever their dates.

Titles in another alphabet

If every entry under an author is in a language with a nonroman script, alphabetize by that language's own rules, so an all-Russian list follows Cyrillic order. If the entries mix that language with English, give transliterations and alphabetize by the transliteration (MLA Style Center).

Checking what a citation generator gives you

A generator saves you from typing, and the default order it produces is mostly right. It is not always right, and the MLA's own advice about generated citations is to treat them as "starting points and not as final products" (MLA Style Center).

We ran a test list through the MLA 9 style file that powers our generator, the open-source CSL style that reference managers such as Zotero also use. Here is what came back correct and what did not.

Correct:

• Surname order, compared letter by letter.
• MacArthur before McAdams.
• A sole-author entry before the same author's co-authored entry.
• Repeated authors replaced with three em dashes, which section 5.126 allows.

Wrong in our output, and worth checking in any tool:

• A title starting with a numeral, such as 1984 or 2 Plus 2, sorted ahead of every letter instead of being filed as if spelled out.
• A no-author title starting with "The" was filed under T, after an entry titled Taxi. MLA files The Hunger Games under H.
• A Dutch name stored with its particle as part of the surname printed and sorted as "van der Berg, Joost" under V. Stored with the particle as a separate field, it printed "Vries, Kaatje de" and sorted correctly.

So after you export the list, do three things by hand:

1. Find every entry that starts with a numeral and move it to where the spelled-out number belongs.
2. Find every no-author entry that starts with A, An, or The and move it to its second word.
3. Read the particle names (van, de, von, al-, Mac, Ó) against the rules above.

If you sort the list yourself in Microsoft Word, select the entries, click the A-Z button on the Home tab, and choose to sort by paragraphs and text. Word sorts by the raw characters, so it makes the same three errors, and it also files "The" titles under T. Run the same three checks afterward, then reapply the hanging indent if it moved. Our guides to the hanging indent in Microsoft Word and in Google Docs have the menu paths.

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

• Sorting one author's works by year. APA orders a single author's works by date; MLA orders them by title. If your Morrison entries run 1970, 1973, 1977, 1987, they are in APA order. Re-sort by title.
• Filing "The" titles under T. The article prints but does not sort. This catches hand-sorted lists and nearly every automatic sort.
• Putting no-author entries at the end. Title entries interfile with name entries in one alphabet. There is no separate section for them.
• Using three hyphens for a different author group. The hyphens mean "exactly the same names, in the same order, as the entry above." Dorris alone and Dorris with Erdrich are different authors for this purpose.
• Numbering the entries. MLA lists are alphabetical and unnumbered. Numbers belong to styles like IEEE.
• Sorting by the first word of the in-text citation instead of the entry. For a Dutch name, the in-text form and the entry both start with the main surname, (Berg 12) and "Berg, Joost van der," so they agree. If yours do not, one of them is wrong.

Quick-reference table