Editing Metaphone (section)

{{Short description|Phonetic algorithm for indexing words}}
{{redirect|Lawrence Philips|the football player|Lawrence Phillips}}

'''Metaphone''' is a [[phonetic algorithm]], published by Lawrence Philips in 1990, for indexing words by their English pronunciation.<ref>Hanging on the Metaphone, Lawrence Philips. Computer Language, Vol. 7, No. 12 (December), 1990.</ref> 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. Metaphone is available as a built-in operator in a number of systems.

Philips later produced a new version of the algorithm, which he named [[#Double Metaphone|Double Metaphone]]. Contrary to the original algorithm whose application is limited to English only, this version takes into account spelling peculiarities of a number of other languages. In 2009 Philips released a third version, called Metaphone 3, which achieves an accuracy of approximately 99% for English words, non-English words familiar to Americans, and first names and family names commonly found in the United States, having been developed according to modern engineering standards against a test harness of prepared correct encodings.