that truly sounds facinating,

Reference: phonetic pronounciation If this was my task I'd look at passing all of the words/strings through Text::Metaphone and saving the results, then index them and look for those that have varying degrees of sounding like each other based on your definition of sounds like...

I know thats not a reverse algorithm approach, but it seems simpler to me...

If that is simply not feasible, eg. the complete list of possible word matches is unknown and you need to generate words/strings, then you might have to create your own module that:-
(a) calculates the phonetic of your word/string, then
(b) calculates all possible phonetic combinations that have the same similarity.
But, I think this approach would suffer from a lot of invalid generated words that don't make sense...