Metaphones

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Metaphone is a phonetic algorithm for indexing words and phrases according to their sound in the English language .

Metaphone was developed by Lawrence Philips in response to the very rough distinguishability of the Soundex algorithm. It is more accurate than Soundex because it is more based on English pronunciation. In contrast to Soundex, in which words are coded character by character, with the Metaphone method the coding of character strings and their position within a word is dependent. The Metaphone algorithm generates codes of variable length that are identical for similar-sounding words or phrases.

Metaphone is implemented as a built-in feature on a number of systems, including newer versions of PHP .

Lawrence Philips later developed an improved variant with more precise results with Double Metaphone .

See also: Kölner Phonetik , Soundex

Metaphone implementations