Text::Soundex is good for finding "sound-alike" matches, but only for English words. If this is the kind of think you're looking for, you may also want to consider Text::Metaphone. It provides similar functionality to Text::Soundex (reducing a word to a simplified "sound description") but is more "phonetically" advanced and can handle phrases, not just single words. Also, neither of these two as slow at String::Approx, as String::Approx has to compute the edit distance between two strings and both Soundex and Metaphone just reduce a string to a "sound description" of it. Of course, both Metaphone and Soundex are of no use to you if your data is not English text.