familiar to Americans, and first names and family names commonly found in the United States. It improves encoding for proper names in particular to a considerable extent. The author claims that in general it improves accuracy for all words from the approximately 89% of Double Metaphone to 98%. Developers can also now set switches in code to cause the algorithm to encode Metaphone keys 1) taking non-initial vowels into account, as well as 2) encoding voiced and unvoiced consonants differently. This allows the result set to be more closely focused if the developer finds that the search results include too many words that don't resemble the search term closely enough. Metaphone 3 is sold as C++, Java, C#, PHP, Perl, and PL/SQL source, Ruby and Python wrappers accessing a Java jar, and also Metaphone 3 for Spanish and German pronunciation available as Java and C# source. The latest revision of the Metaphone 3 algorithm is v2.5.4, released March 2015. The Metaphone3 Java source code for an earlier version, 2.1.3, lacking a large number of encoding corrections made in the current version, version 2.5.4, was included as part of the OpenRefine project and is publicly viewable. Common misconceptions There are some misconceptions about the Metaphone algorithms that should be addressed. The following statements are true: All of them are designed to address regular, "dictionary" words, not just names, and Metaphone algorithms do not produce phonetic representations of the input words and names; rather, the output is an intentionally approximate phonetic representation, according to this standard: words that start with a vowel sound will have an 'A', representing any vowel, as the first character of the encoding (in Double Metaphone and Metaphone 3 - original Metaphone just preserves the actual vowel), vowels after an initial vowel sound will be disregarded and not encoded, and voiced/unvoiced consonant pairs will be mapped to the same encoding. (Examples of voiced/unvoiced consonant pairs are D/T, B/P, Z/S, G/K, etc.). This approximate encoding is necessary to account for the way English speakers vary their pronunciations and misspell or otherwise vary words and names they are trying to spell. Vowels, of course, are notoriously highly variable. British speakers often complain that Americans seem to pronounce 'T's the same as 'D'. Consider, also, that all English speakers often pronounce 'Z' where 'S' is spelled, almost always when a noun ending in a voiced consonant or a liquid is pluralized,