Phonetic search
The phonetic search is a search method to search for similar sounding words and sounds in human languages . With the help of phonetics or phonology , an attempt is made to find a phonetic (“tonal”) representation of a word and to search for it - two words “match” if they have the same phonetic representation .
To find a phonetic representation, the words are broken down into phonemes . Depending on how “fuzzy” the search should be, similar sounds are grouped together. In the simplest case, only the phonetic representation of the search term is compared with the phonetic representation of the words to be searched. For example, “Maier” and “Mayr” are also found when searching for “Meier”.
Phonetic search is used, for example, by search engines , online dictionaries or spell check programs.