In the previous parts of this series I discussed the Soundex and Levenshtein Distance algorithms for phonetic string matching. In this next part of the series I want to introduce the Metaphone algorithm.

Metaphone is a phonetic algorithm for indexing words by their English pronunciation. It fundamentally improves on the Soundex algorithm by using information about variations and inconsistencies in English spelling and pronunciation to produce a more accurate encoding, which does a better job of matching words and names which sound similar. As with Soundex, similar sounding words should share the same keys.