如何在线性时间内对长度为k的n个单词进行排序？

Question

I want to implement an algorithm to sort n words of length k, the words will contain only English words (so from az).

I tried to use the counting sort by casting the first element of the word -> character to its integer representation and then use Counting Sort (Linear Time Sorting), this kind of works but it is only sorting the first character ie when two or more words have the same first character then they are not sorted by their second character?

Can someone guide me or give me a hint for another approach which will let me sort these n words in linear time?

Answer 1

Radix sort is probably the way to go - it will stable sort each word by the i-th letter. Since you're working with characters, you're essentially already working in the appropriate radix!