SOUNDEX

Syntax

Description of the illustration soundex.gif

Purpose

SOUNDEX returns a character string containing the phonetic representation of char. This function lets you compare words that are spelled differently, but sound alike in English.

The phonetic representation is defined in The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 3: Sorting and Searching, by Donald E. Knuth, as follows:

1. Retain the first letter of the string and remove all other occurrences of the following letters: a, e, h, i, o, u, w, y.

2. Assign numbers to the remaining letters (after the first) as follows:

   b, f, p, v = 1
   c, g, j, k, q, s, x, z = 2
   d, t = 3
   l = 4
   m, n = 5
   r = 6
   
   

3. If two or more letters with the same number were adjacent in the original name (before step 1), or adjacent except for any intervening h and w, then omit all but the first.

4. Return the first four bytes padded with 0.

char can be of any of the datatypes CHAR, VARCHAR2, NCHAR, or NVARCHAR2. The return value is the same datatype as char.

This function does not support CLOB data directly. However, CLOBs can be passed in as arguments through implicit data conversion.

Examples

The following example returns the employees whose last names are a phonetic representation of "Smyth":

SELECT last_name, first_name
     FROM hr.employees
     WHERE SOUNDEX(last_name)
         = SOUNDEX('SMYTHE');

LAST_NAME  FIRST_NAME
---------- ----------
Smith      Lindsey
Smith      William