1# Phonetic Matching 2 3Phonetic matching, a.k.a "Jon or John", allows searching for terms based on their pronunciation. This capability can be a useful tool when searching for names of people. 4 5Phonetic matching is based on the use of a phonetic algorithm. A phonetic algorithm transforms the input term to an approximate representation of its pronunciation. This allows indexing terms, and consequently searching, by their pronunciation. 6 7As of v1.4 RediSearch provides phonetic matching via the definition of text fields with the `PHONETIC` attribute. This causes the terms in such fields to be indexed both by their textual value as well as their phonetic approximation. 8 9Performing a search on `PHONETIC` fields will, by default, also return results for phonetically similar terms. This behavior can be controlled with the [`$phonetic` query attribute](Query_Syntax.md#query_attributes). 10 11## Phonetic algorithms support 12 13RediSearch currently supports a single phonetic algorithm, the [Double Metaphone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphone#Double_Metaphone) (DM). It uses the implementation at [slacy/double-metaphone](https://github.com/slacy/double-metaphone), which provides general support for Latin languages. 14