[snip] > Trouble is, you can never guarantee that you're dealing with actual words. > What of you're comparing someone's password that happens to contain > combination of letters that act in this way? Well, in this case why would you care about how passwords are sorted ? :-) I think if the strings are linguistically meaningless, then it's also more or less meaningless how you sort them. The best thing would be to be able to specify the locale of each column, then this problem would go away, as you could sort text differently then passwords... Cheers, Csaba.