# Sort a Python Dictionary by Its Values in Order

> Use the sorted() function with dict.items() and a key based on value to build a new dictionary ordered by value, or OrderedDict on older Python versions

**URL:** https://sentry.io/answers/python-dictionary-sort-by-value/

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## The Problem

How can I sort a dictionary by value in Python?

## The Solution

Python dictionaries were originally intended to be used for data that does not have a meaningful order. In older versions of Python, no order is guaranteed. However, as of [Python 3.7](https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.7.html), key-value pairs in Python dictionaries are ordered according to when they were inserted. This means that we can sort a dictionary by sorting its key-value pairs and creating a new dictionary from them. The code below shows how to do this:

```python
prices = {"Orange": 3, "Avocado": 5, "Apple": 1, "Pear": 2, "Grapefruit": 4}
prices_sorted = dict(sorted(prices.items(), key=lambda item: item[1]))

print(prices_sorted) # will output {"Apple": 1, "Pear": 2, "Orange": 3, "Grapefruit": 4, "Avocado": 5}
```

Here we use Python's built-in [`sorted()`](https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#sorted) function to sort our dictionary's [items](https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#dict.items) (i.e. its key-value pairs) by value, ascending. We then convert the output of `sorted()`, which will be a list of tuples, into a new dictionary. As items will be inserted into our new dictionary in order of their values, we now have a dictionary ordered by value.

In older versions of Python, we would need to use an [`OrderedDict`](https://docs.python.org/3/library/collections.html#collections.OrderedDict) from Python's built-in [`collections`](https://docs.python.org/3/library/collections.html) module in place of an ordinary dictionary, as shown below:

```python
from collections import OrderedDict

prices = {"Orange": 3, "Avocado": 5, "Apple": 1, "Pear": 2, "Grapefruit": 4}
prices_sorted = OrderedDict(sorted(prices.items(), key=lambda item: item[1]))

print(prices_sorted) # will output OrderedDict([("Apple", 1), ("Pear", 2), ("Orange", 3), ("Grapefruit", 4), ("Avocado", 5)])
```

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*Source: [sentry.io/answers/python-dictionary-sort-by-value/](https://sentry.io/answers/python-dictionary-sort-by-value/)*