Free Tool

Damerau-Levenshtein Distance

The true Damerau-Levenshtein distance — edit distance with unrestricted transpositions, the most accurate metric for real-world typing errors.

Tilores uses Damerau-Levenshtein in production — so you can automate matching with rules you configure.

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Try it yourself

String A

String B

Edit Distance

Match

How it works

The true Damerau-Levenshtein distance allows insertions, deletions, substitutions, and transpositions — and unlike the OSA variant, it permits multiple operations on the same substring. Research shows that over 80% of human spelling errors are covered by these four operations. This makes it the most accurate general-purpose edit distance for real-world data entry errors. It is more computationally intensive than the OSA variant but produces correct results for all inputs, including cases where the same characters are rearranged multiple times.

Use cases in entity resolution

Spell checking

Accurate name deduplication

Data entry error correction

Identity document matching

Related tools

Levenshtein Distance

Calculate the minimum number of single-character edits (insertions, deletions, substitutions) needed to transform one string into another.

Jaro-Winkler Distance

Measure string similarity with extra weight for matching prefixes — ideal for name matching in entity resolution.

OSA Damerau-Levenshtein Distance

Calculate edit distance allowing insertions, deletions, substitutions, and transpositions — catches swapped adjacent characters like "teh" → "the".

Don't implement this yourself

Tilores Studio runs the full matching engine — this algorithm plus configurable rules and real-time entity resolution — locally on your machine. Free, no account, no cloud. Load your own data and see it working in minutes.

Download Tilores Studio