While I like the idea of Soundex I always had problems with is fixed length. In addition it is limited to the English language and for other languages you might

While I like the idea of Soundex I always had problems with is fixed length. In addition it is limited to the English language and for other languages you might need different algorithms (e.g. Cologne phonetics [1] for German). As others have mentioned, Metaphone [2] is another alternative which got some traction in recent years, but I haven't tried it in a real world scenario yet. For some use-cases n-gram [3] based string comparison might be an option too. It is in no way phonetic (therefore universal for many languages), but when it is just about finding similar words it often produces better results than the original Soundex (mostly due to its length limitation). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cologne_phonetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cologne_phonetics [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphone [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-gram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-gram