// Metaphone - Phonetic algorithm for indexing words by their pronunciation
Encodes words based on pronunciation, not spelling.
Find words that sound similar but spelled differently.
Designed specifically for English pronunciation rules.
Metaphone is a phonetic algorithm that encodes words based on their English pronunciation. It applies a series of transformation rules to convert letters and letter combinations into phonetic codes. Similar sounding words produce the same code, making it useful for fuzzy matching, spell checking, and name matching in databases.
Common transformations:
PH � F (phone � FON)
CH � X (church � XRCH)
C+E/I/Y � S (center � SNTR)
G+E/I/Y � J (george � JRJ)
Similar sounding words:
Smith � SM0
Smythe � SM0
Schmidt � XMT
Knight � NT
Night � NT
Cough � KF
Coffee � KFMetaphone is a phonetic algorithm published by Lawrence Philips in 1990. It improves on Soundex by using more complex rules that better match English pronunciation patterns.
Metaphone uses more sophisticated rules and considers letter positions and combinations. It's more accurate for English words than Soundex, which was designed for surnames and uses simpler numeric codes.
Metaphone codes are commonly used in spell checkers, search engines, database deduplication, genealogy research, and any application that needs to match words that sound similar but may be spelled differently.
Yes, Metaphone is specifically designed for English pronunciation. For other languages, different phonetic algorithms like Cologne phonetic (German) or Caverphone (New Zealand English) may be more appropriate.