Find similar words by pronunciation - algorithms, approaches, libraries

Question

By 'table' it should find 'cable', 'tabular' etc. E.g. like you type the word in type in dictionary and it says may be you wanted word1, word2 which are close in spell to the one I typed.

What is the name of algorithms and approaches used? Any libraries providing the functionality (C/C++, Ruby)?

I need to search by word (dictionary-like application), no phrases, sentences, etc.

Answer 1

As well as Soundex which was developed as far back as 1918 there are also Metaphone and Double Metaphone which were developed in the 1990s and 2000s respectively specifically to be be improvements over Soundex.