NIST

double metaphone

(algorithm)

Definition: An algorithm to code English words (and foreign words often heard in the United States) phonetically by reducing them to a combination of 12 consonant sounds. It returns two codes if a word has two plausible pronunciations, such as a foreign word. This reduces matching problems from wrong spelling.

Generalization (I am a kind of ...)
phonetic coding algorithm.

See also Jaro-Winkler, Caverphone, NYSIIS, soundex, metaphone, Levenshtein distance.

Note: This is an improved version of metaphone. In 2009 Lawrence Philips produced Metaphone 3, which reportedly "increases the accuracy of phonetic encoding".

Author: PEB

Implementation

Many metaphone and double metaphone (Basic, C, Perl, and C++) implementations. Apache codec implementations of soundex, Metaphone, and Double Metaphone (Java).

More information

Lawrence Philips, The Double Metaphone Search Algorithm, C/C++ Users Journal, June 2000. on-line article accessed October 2013.


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Entry modified 19 July 2021.
HTML page formatted Mon Jul 19 10:37:07 2021.

Cite this as:
Paul E. Black, "double metaphone", in Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures [online], Paul E. Black, ed. 19 July 2021. (accessed TODAY) Available from: https://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/doubleMetaphone.html