Levenshtein is good for many languages.

However, for English nothing beats soundex type algo. I believe major SQLs and php do soundex.

Soundex is an old algorithm, century old, designed to find immigrants by their last name, no matter how they converted it from their native language to english. For example: if one came and had name Szczybliewski or had it Shcheeblevsky , then soundex should return close match.

Metaphone is improved version of soundex (available in php). And if you are careful, you can find double-metaphone out there.

Kind regards

Levenshtein/edit distance isn't too useful for spell checking though. Edit distance can yield you the absolute difference between two words, but your goal is to find the words that have the smallest such distance with the word in question. Simply calculating the edit distance between the word in question and all other dictionary words isn't good enough - you'll have to be a bit more clever.

Levenshtein Distance ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance ) is a standard algorithm taught in algorithm courses as a standard example of Dynamic Programming.

Some discussion here : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1564184/edit-distance-alg...