diff --git a/Documentation/config.txt b/Documentation/config.txt
index eb66a11975..fd1b5837d0 100644
--- a/Documentation/config.txt
+++ b/Documentation/config.txt
@@ -1710,7 +1710,7 @@ doing the same for `receive.fsck.<msg-id>` and `fetch.fsck.<msg-id>`
 will only cause git to warn.
 
 fsck.skipList::
-	The path to a sorted list of object names (i.e. one SHA-1 per
+	The path to a list of object names (i.e. one SHA-1 per
 	line) that are known to be broken in a non-fatal way and should
 	be ignored. This feature is useful when an established project
 	should be accepted despite early commits containing errors that
@@ -1725,6 +1725,14 @@ Unlike variables like `color.ui` and `core.editor` the
 fall back on the `fsck.skipList` configuration if they aren't set. To
 uniformly configure the same fsck settings in different circumstances
 all three of them they must all set to the same values.
++
+Older versions of Git (before 2.20) documented that the object names
+list should be sorted. This was never a requirement, the object names
+can appear in any order, but when reading the list we track whether
+the list is sorted for the purposes of an internal binary search
+implementation, which can save itself some work with an already sorted
+list. Unless you have a humongous list there's no reason to go out of
+your way to pre-sort the list.
 
 gc.aggressiveDepth::
 	The depth parameter used in the delta compression
diff --git a/t/t5504-fetch-receive-strict.sh b/t/t5504-fetch-receive-strict.sh
index cbae31f330..fa56052f0f 100755
--- a/t/t5504-fetch-receive-strict.sh
+++ b/t/t5504-fetch-receive-strict.sh
@@ -142,6 +142,25 @@ test_expect_success 'fsck with no skipList input' '
 	test_i18ngrep "missingEmail" err
 '
 
+test_expect_success 'setup sorted and unsorted skipLists' '
+	cat >SKIP.unsorted <<-EOF &&
+	0000000000000000000000000000000000000004
+	0000000000000000000000000000000000000002
+	$commit
+	0000000000000000000000000000000000000001
+	0000000000000000000000000000000000000003
+	EOF
+	sort SKIP.unsorted >SKIP.sorted
+'
+
+test_expect_success 'fsck with sorted skipList' '
+	git -c fsck.skipList=SKIP.sorted fsck
+'
+
+test_expect_success 'fsck with unsorted skipList' '
+	git -c fsck.skipList=SKIP.unsorted fsck
+'
+
 test_expect_success 'fsck with invalid or bogus skipList input' '
 	git -c fsck.skipList=/dev/null -c fsck.missingEmail=ignore fsck &&
 	test_must_fail git -c fsck.skipList=does-not-exist -c fsck.missingEmail=ignore fsck 2>err &&