As an FYI, nosferatu-man's and my solutions are better than S. Carton's, but require Python 2.4. The "key" parameter to sort/sorted does a "Decorate-Sort-Undecorate"[1] automatically, whereas the ...

How to Assign a Value to a Word in Python. The Python programming language, despite its ease of use, offers a depth of useful functions, modules and data structures.