Talk:Soundex

message: Soundex may be used for indexing words, but it was specifically designed for names, and doesn't always apply well to much else. RossPatterson 21:39, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Soundex was specifically designed to index names of Western European origin, and not much else.  This was a huge bias on the inventor(s) part since they were American, and in the 18th/19th centuries the vast majority of Americans had surnames of Western European origin.  This is not necessarily the case today.  PS - Can someone please demonstrate that Magaret Odell had anything to do with this patent?  I don't see where she appears anywhere on the patent as a patent holder and I can't find any information on her anywhere...  Thx.  12.110.196.19 15:48, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Knuth describes Soundex in volume 3 (p. 394 in the second edition) as: "... a technique that was originally developed by Margaret K. Odell and Robert C. Russell [see U.S. Patents 1261167 (1918), 1435663 (1922)], ...", and that's good enough for me.  I expect just about every reference you'll find on the web goes back to Knuth.  It's certainly true that only Russell's name is on those two patents, but I see on re-reading that neither Knuth nor this article say that Odell held the patents. RossPatterson 02:00, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This page said Odell was a co-inventory back in the March revision.  I see someone updated the page to reflect that Daitch-Mokotoff returns up to 32 separate encodings.  The range of encodings, however, is actually 000000 to 999999; although many numeric combinations in this range will never be encountered because of restrictions on side-by-side duplicate digits in the rules for the algorithm.69.116.243.218 02:20, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Soundex may be used for indexing words

message: I'm sorry Sudipta, because I do believe you were acting in perfectly good faith and put plenty of effort into your C implementation of the algorithm, but unfortunately incorporating your own work contravenes the No Original Research standard so I removed it. I hope you understand. Fortunately there are plenty of avenues on the internet where publishing original code is positively encouraged, so maybe your implementation can find a public there? --VinceBowdren 22:41, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  C Code removal 

message: The description of the meaning of 'h' and 'w' is not at all clear. The section also states that vowels can affect the coding, but it doesn't say anything about in which way they do. Furthermore one of the examples given is not correct: Ashcraft is coded A261, not A226 (see http://www.archives.gov/genealogy/census/soundex.html ). I suggest the Rules section either be rewritten, or maybe even removed completely. 79.136.60.98 (talk) 23:22, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I have rewritten the H & W rules according to the US Census Bureau (http://www.archives.gov/research/census/soundex.html).  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Copyeditor42 (talk • contribs) 15:46, 8 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clarity and correctness of Rules section 

message: It's been a few years since I've even logged in to wiki to post something, so please forgive any inadvertent lapses in wiki etiquette. 
I happened to run across this term today on Slashdot (in reference to Tamerlan Tsarnaev) and jumped over here to see what it said about Soundex.  
I learned about the term back in 1993 when I started as a police officer.  When a user "ran" somebody on the computer system, the user might get a wanted hit on a similar name.  That was taught to me as a "Soundex" and further confirmation was needed if the name wasn't an exact match.  The joke was that more times than not the "matched" name wasn't even close.  I never knew until today exactly how the database actually returned the name. 
Anyway, I thought it might be of some interest to those of you that were maintaining this entry.  
Trick414 (talk) 02:59, 27 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Additional Information 

message: CCA's database system Model-204 includes a funtion ($SNDX) which works a little differently and doesn't follow the 3-digit rule at all. It will return as many (or few) characters as there continue to be consonants but ignores W, H, Y and doubles, so Ashcraft is encoded as A22613, while Murray becomes M6 (no extra zeroes). It considers the extra length useful for database indexes. Model 204 User Language manual (various editions) $SNDXRogerclarinet (talk) 19:46, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  CCA's database system's version of Soundex funtion ($SNDX) 

message: Is the goal really to match homophones? A homophone, according to its wikipedia entry, is "..a word that is pronounced the same (to varying extent) as another word but differs in meaning". Isn't soundex typically used to match words that are pronounced that same and have the same meaning?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by JonasRosenqvist (talk • contribs) 08:32, 5 June 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  homophone?