Near-Duplicate Name Detector
Exact duplicates in a list are easy to spot. The ones that cause trouble are \u201cStephen\u201d and \u201cStephan\u201d, or a name typed once with a trailing space. This compares every pair two ways — how many single-character edits apart they are, and whether they share a phonetic key — and reports what it finds without merging anything, because deciding whether two similar names are the same person is not a job for a program.
What this generator does
Trims and case-folds every entry to find exact repeats, then compares every remaining pair by edit distance and by a phonetic key. Both directions are verified: nothing is reported that does not qualify, and nothing qualifying is left out.
How to use this tool
- Paste your list, one entry per line.
- Set how many character edits still counts as similar.
- Read the exact repeats and the similar pairs.
- Decide for yourself which are genuinely the same.
Understanding the controls
- Your list
- One entry per line, up to three hundred. Every pair is compared, so the work grows with the square of the list.
- Edit threshold
- How many single-character insertions, deletions or substitutions still counts as similar. One catches typos; three starts catching genuinely different names.
Common use cases
- Cleaning a guest list or a mailing list before sending
- Finding accidental double entries in a sign-up sheet
- Spotting the same person entered two ways
- Checking a list of names for typos
- Reviewing an imported list for near-duplicates
How this generator works
Entries are trimmed and lower-cased before comparison, so trailing spaces and capitalisation never create a false difference. Each remaining pair is measured by Levenshtein distance and by a Soundex-style phonetic key, which codes consonants by sound so that \u201csmith\u201d and \u201csmyth\u201d match. Before display every pair in the list is re-tested and compared against what was reported — in both directions, because a detector that flags nothing would pass a one-sided check perfectly.
Randomness and fairness
Nothing here is random. The same list always produces the same report.
For how randomness is produced across the whole site, see how Generate Random works.
Limitations and good to know
- Similarity is not identity: two people genuinely can be called Stephen and Stephan, so nothing is merged automatically.
- The phonetic key is a simple Soundex variant tuned to English, and it does poorly on names from other languages.
- Edit distance treats a transposition as two changes, so \u201cSimth\u201d and \u201cSmith\u201d need a threshold of two.
- Every pair is compared, so a very long list is slow — the limit of three hundred entries is there for that reason.
Privacy and your data
Your list stays in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, no entry is stored, and no name is ever included in analytics — only how many entries there were.
Related generators
- List Comparison GeneratorSplits two lists into what is only in the first, only in the second and in both, checked to account for every entry exactly once.
- Random Name PickerPaste a list of names and instantly pick one at random, fairly and without repeats if you choose.
- Quota Sampling GeneratorSplits a sample across groups in proportion to their size, with the quotas adding up to exactly the sample size and nobody picked twice.
- Edit Distance CalculatorThe fewest single-character edits that turn one word into another, listed step by step and proved by replaying them.