Grey and Gray. Colour and Color. Words like these have been the cause of many heated arguments between Brits and Americans.
Accents (and jokes) aside, there are many words that are pronounced the same way but have different spellings.
While it is easy for us to realize their equivalence, basic programming commands will fail to equate such two strings.
More extreme than word spellings are names because people have more flexibility in choosing to spell a name in a certain way.
To some extent, tradition sometimes governs the way a name is spelled, which limits the number of variations of any given English name.
But if we consider global names and their associated English spellings, you can only imagine how many ways they can be spelled out.
One way to tackle this challenge is to write a program that checks if two strings sound the same, instead of checking for equivalence in spellings.
We'll do that here using fuzzy name matching.