Hi, Thanks everyone, I looked at the soundex module, but somewhere it said that it only considered English words and pronounciations... some of the names I have to work with are Indian, Chinese and even African :-( The problem in more details: I have a group of people calling two different helpdesks. They give their names to be identified. I need to find out which people call both helpdesks, and I can only use their names as identification: they do not give their IDs, and their departments change quite often so that would be not useful to compare. But these can be spelled wrongly by the helpdesk personnel; also, for example, a Robert Carlos could give his name as Bob Carlos sometimes :-( I don't know that I can do much about short forms of names, but I would like different spellings to be identified as the same person as much as possible. Thank you very much, Eyi.