The StringComparison enumeration is used to specify whether a string comparison should use the current culture or the invariant culture, word or ordinal sort rules, and be case-sensitive or case-insensitive.
An operation that uses word sort rules performs a culture-sensitive comparison wherein certain nonalphanumeric Unicode characters might have special weights assigned to them. Using word sort rules and the conventions of a specific culture, the hyphen ("-") might have a very small weight assigned to it so that "coop" and "co-op" appear next to each other in a sorted list.
An operation that uses ordinal sort rules performs a comparison based on the numeric value (Unicode code point) of each Char in the string. An ordinal comparison is fast, but culture-insensitive. Using ordinal sort rules a string that starts with some Unicode character, U+xxxx, comes before a string that starts with some Unicode character, U+yyyy, if the value of xxxx is numerically less than yyyy.
For more information about comparisons, see the System..::.String class remarks. For more information about culture, see the System.Globalization..::.CultureInfo class remarks.