Say I have a list of words that need to retain their order, and need to be sorted into two columns.

I can do this rather well with a tabular:

\begin{tabular}{l l}
abc & def \\
ghi & jkl \\
\end{tabular}

But doing so makes it rather difficult and time consuming to reorder the list.

Is it possible to have an automatically wrapped two-column list? Ideally, I would like to simply enter an ordered list:

\begin{magic}
abc \\
def \\
ghi \\
jkl \\
\end{magic}

And have it wrapped to two columns (as the tabular enables):

abc  def
ghi  jkl