IT Services Circle

Feb 4, 2026 · Interview Experience

How to Verify Alien Dictionary Order Efficiently (LeetCode 953)

This article first presents a quirky roundup of Chinese companies' record‑breaking year‑end bonuses, then shifts to a detailed explanation of LeetCode problem 953, describing how to determine whether a list of words is sorted according to a custom alien alphabet using both full‑array sorting and an optimized pairwise comparison approach, complete with Java code.