You can save a little time by checking the first characters of the strings in question before doing the call. Obviously, if the first characters differ, there's no reason to call strcmp to check the rest. Because of the non-uniform distribution of letters in natural languages, the payoff is not 26:1 but more like 15:1 for uppercase data. #define QUICKIE_STRCMP(a, b) (*(a) != *(b) ? \ (int) ((unsigned char) *(a) - \ (unsigned char) *(b)) : \ strcmp((a), (b))) But watch out: There's a double evaluation going on, so this can be counter-productive if the arguments to strcmp aren't just simple variables. If you're working on adjacent strings in sorted input, you will almost always have to check past the first character anyway. An entirely different way to speed up strcmp is to place all your strings into a single array, in order. Then you only have to compare the pointers, not the strings. If the point of all the calls to strcmp is to search for a value from a large, known set and you expect that you'll be doing many such searches then you'll want to invest in a hash table.