Your question is almost verbatim the MSDN definition of SOUNDEX. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187384.aspx

Now with the two phrases you listed the SOUNDEX would not be even close because the order of the words is different. We can leverage the age old DelimitedSplit8K here quite nicely. The idea here is order all words in each phrase alphabetically so we have a consistent order of the words for SOUNDEX.

if OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#List') is not null

drop table #List

create table #List

(

ListID int identity,

Phrase varchar(50)

)

insert #List

select 'US Eastern District Court'

union all

select 'Eastern District Court of US'

;with List as

(

--First we need to split the values on the words

select * from #List

cross apply dbo.DelimitedSplit8K(Phrase, ' ')

)

, stuffedList as

(

--Now we sort the words alphabetically

select ListID, STUFF((select Item + ' '

from List l2

where l2.ListID = l1.ListID

order by Item

for XML PATH('')), 1, 0, '') as FullList

from List l1

group by ListID

)

select *, SOUNDEX(FullList) from stuffedList

Please see the link in my signature about splitting strings. In there you will find the code and the logic for how the DelimitedSplit8K function works.