sortate

Sortate is a term used in some programming and data-management contexts to denote the act of arranging elements in a collection according to a defined order. In this sense, sortate is synonymous with sorting, though it is not a widely standardized term and may appear as a placeholder or pedagogical label in tutorials and pseudocode. The word is formed from the root sort- meaning to classify or arrange, together with the suffix -ate that yields a verb.

In computer science, sortate refers to applying a sorting operation to a dataset to produce an ordered sequence. The operation can be implemented by a range of sorting algorithms, such as quicksort, mergesort, or heapsort, each offering different trade-offs in time complexity, memory usage, and stability. Stability—the property that equal elements preserve their relative order—may be required in applications like multi-key sorting or when preserving input history is important.

Variants of sortate include partial sorts, where only the top k elements are ordered, and external sorts, designed for datasets that exceed available memory. In database systems, sortate corresponds to the ordering step used for index creation or query result presentation.

Etymologically, sortate traces to the Latin root sort- and the English agentive suffix -ate, but there is no single canonical definition beyond the basic notion of arranging data. See also sorting, sorting algorithms, stable sort, and external sort.