Verifying an Alien Dictionary

Explore how to verify if a list of words is sorted according to an alien language's custom alphabet order. Learn to apply topological sort techniques to compare words lexicographically using a given order string. This lesson helps you develop problem-solving skills for tasks involving custom lexicographical order checks.

We'll cover the following...

Statement
Examples
Understand the problem
Figure it out!
Try it yourself

Statement

In an alien language, the alphabet consists of the same lowercase English letters but arranged in a different order.

Given a list of words, words, written in this alien language, and a string order representing the order of the alien alphabet (as a permutation of lowercase letters), return TRUE if the words are sorted lexicographically according to order; otherwise, return FALSE.

Note: A word a is considered lexicographically smaller than word b if:
At the first position where the two words differ, the character in a comes before the character in b in the given order string.
If one word is a prefix of the other (and all compared characters are ...