Abstract: Disclosed is a method of phonetically encoding a text document. The method comprises providing, for a current word in the text document, a phonetically equivalent encoded word comprising one or more syllables, each syllable comprising a sequence of phonemes from a predetermined phoneme set, the sequence being phonetically equivalent to the corresponding syllable in the current word, and adding the phonetically equivalent encoded word or the current word at a current position in the phonetically encoded document, Each phoneme in the phoneme set is associated with a base grapheme that is pronounced as the phoneme in one or more English words.