The spell checker in Microsoft Word 97 had a quirk that earned a lot of giggles. If you typed zzzzz, the suggested correction was sex. Some people saw the quirk as intentional humor or sabotage, and a psychoanalyst probably could have had a field day with it. But the likely culprit was the SOUNDEX algorithm, which SQL Server implements with its built-in SOUNDEX() function. The SOUNDEX algorithm converts a word to an encoded representation of its pronunciation. So, SOUNDEX('Smith') and SOUNDEX('Smythe') both return the encoded value S530. And SOUNDEX('zzzzz') returns Z200, which is a close match to the result SOUNDEX('sex') produces: S200.

My compa...