As I had promised in the UDS BOF in Cesme, I have implemented a phonetic search routine in the LISTSERV database functions. I have used the 'SOUNDX' algorithm, which is used in a lot of commercial database systems. The implementation was based on a FORTRAN program that Peter Flynn sent me (thanks!). I would like to state that I do not consider myself responsible for the behaviour of this algorithm. I strongly believe that there is NO algorithm in the world that can perform decent phonetic searches compatible with the 22 languages that are presently being used on EARN. You will appreciate, for example, that my name (THOMAS) does not 'sound like' the way it is pronounced (TOMA). Also, SPOOL does not sound like POOL, and POOL does not sound like PULL (it does sound like PILULE, though :-) ). I could spend days listing similar examples. The implementation has been done through a pair of new operators, SOUNDS LIKE and DOES NOT SOUND LIKE (the latter being there for purely aesthetical reasons). They work in the same way as, for example, CONTAINS and DOES NOT CONTAIN. You could therefore do: Select * in BITEARN where SITE sounds like HEKHOLL (Note that HEKHOLL does sound like ECOLE :-) ) The actual implementation of SOUNDS LIKE is a bit more subtle than for the regular operators: - If the search parameter you specified contains more than one word, a 'dumb' phonetic comparison takes place on the two strings. Note that it is generally not a good idea to try to match long strings phonetically, as the SOUNDX algorithm will only compare the first 4 "phonems". That is, the strings will "sound alike" if, and only if, the first few characters do. - If you specified only one word, it is phonetically compared to all the words in the 'source' string, and you have a hit if it matches any of them. In other words, that is a "contains something that sounds like" operation. Eric