Measure the pronounceability of a word?

Question

I\'m tinkering with a domain name finder and want to favour those words which are easy to pronounce.

Example: nameoic.com (bad) versus namelet.com (good).

Wa

Answer 1

Here is a function which should work with the most common of words... It should give you a nice result between 1 (perfect pronounceability according to the rules) to 0.

The following function far from perfect (it doesn't quite like words like Tsunami [0.857]). But it should be fairly easy to tweak for your needs.

= 0 && !in_array($word[$pos - 1], $vowels)) {
                $score += 1;
                $pos += 1;
                continue;
            }
        } else { // Not a vowel, check if next one is, or if is end of word
            if (($pos + 1) < $len && in_array($word[$pos + 1], $vowels)) {
                $score += 2;
                $pos += 2;
                continue;
            } elseif (($pos + 1) == $len) {
                $score += 1;
                break;
            }
        }

        $pos += 1;
    }

    return $score / $len;
}