Abstract: A phonetic suggestion engine for providing word or phrase suggestions for an input letter string initially converts an input letter string into one or more query phoneme sequences. The conversion is performed via at least one standardized letter-to-sound (LTS) database. The phonetic suggestion engine further obtains a plurality of candidate phoneme sequences that are phonetically similar to the at query phoneme sequences from a pool of potential phoneme sequences. The phonetic suggestion engine then prunes the plurality of candidate phoneme sequences to generate scored phoneme sequences. The phonetic suggestion engine subsequently generates a plurality of ranked word or phrase suggestions based on the scored phoneme sequences.