Soundex
- Date
- 1918 (patente) / 1922 (mejora) · confidence medium
- Place
- United States
- Credited to
- Margaret K Odell y Robert Russell
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What it is
A phonetic algorithm that encodes surnames by how they sound in English, grouping homophones with different spellings under the same code; later widely used to index censuses and now a standard database function.
What it led to
- phonetic indexing of US censuses and historical records
- a standard function in database engines (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle...)
- the basis for later, more precise phonetic algorithms
- use in approximate matching of proper names