Category 10 — String Search & Similarity
Phonetic encoding for fuzzy name matching — Soundex, Metaphone, and Double Metaphone.
Word or Name box — the four encodings appear instantly in the Encodings panel below.Smith, Robert, or Catherine buttons to load a sample name and see how each algorithm handles it.Copy on any encoding card to copy that single code to your clipboard.Batch Mode tab and paste one word per line to encode a whole list at once in a table.Copy CSV to copy every result as comma-separated values.Smith and Smythe both encode to S530, so you can find records even when the spelling differs.
Group contacts with slightly different name spellings before a merge, instead of relying on exact string equality.
Historical records often spell surnames inconsistently. Soundex-style keys were designed for exactly this kind of fuzzy lookup.
Precompute phonetic keys and query by key to suggest names that sound similar even when users misspell them.
See Soundex, Metaphone, and Double Metaphone output for the same input, so you know which key fits your matching use case.
Everything runs in your browser. Names and keys never leave your machine — safe for internal or customer data.
Soundex is a phonetic algorithm from the early 1900s. It keeps the first letter and maps the remaining consonants to digits — BFPV=1, CGJKQSXZ=2, DT=3, L=4, MN=5, R=6 — then pads to four characters. Vowels and H/W/Y are dropped.
Metaphone (1990) is a more sophisticated successor to Soundex that reduces a word to a 1–6 character phonetic key. Double Metaphone produces a primary and an alternate key to account for variant pronunciations. Both target English names.
Because th and y are ignored in Soundex, leaving the same consonant pattern — both encode to S530. That's the whole point: these keys group spellings that sound similar.
Soundex always keeps the original first letter, so Catherine becomes C365 while Kathryn becomes K365. Despite sounding alike, they differ at the first letter and won't group together under Soundex.
Metaphone uses 0 (zero) to represent the "TH" sound, as in Thomas → 0MS. It's a phonetic marker, not a numeric value.
No. Phonetic keys are lossy one-way reductions — many different words map to the same code, so you can't recover the original name from a key. They're meant for matching, not storage.
Never. All encoding runs locally in JavaScript. Your names are not sent to, stored on, or logged by any server.