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Metaphone

Metaphone (Lawrence Philips, 1990): English spelling reduced to the sounds it stands for.

public static class Metaphone

Example — two silent letters, gone.

using Lodestar.Text.Phonetics;

string knight = Metaphone.Encode("Knight");  // => NT
string wright = Metaphone.Encode("Wright");  // => RT

Remarks — this is the one of the three that knows how English is spelled. Knight starts with an n sound and Wright with an r, and Metaphone says so; Soundex and Nysiis both key on the written first letter and file them under K and W.

The output alphabet is B X S K J T F H L M N P R 0 W Y, where X is "sh" and 0 is "th" — Thomas encodes to 0MS and Christina to XRSTN. Vowels appear only at the start of a word. The code is variable length, and on the 123 real words it is pinned to it runs from 1 to 6 characters.

Reference behaviour is jellyfish.metaphone on real words. Decision 0005 records why the corpus is real words rather than the shared random one: on degenerate letter sequences, jellyfish exhibits quirks of its C implementation that are not worth reproducing, so this implementation does not claim parity there.

Applies to — net10.0, netstandard2.0.

See also — Soundex, Nysiis, the phonetics index.

Members

Member	What it does
Metaphone.Encode	The Metaphone code of one word.