Human beings generate different speech waveforms while speaking the same word at different
times. Also, different human beings have different accents and generate significantly varying
speech waveforms for the same word. There is a need to measure the distances between various
words which facilitate preparation of pronunciation dictionaries. A new algorithm called
Dynamic Phone Warping (DPW) is presented in this paper. It uses dynamic programming
technique for global alignment and shortest distance measurements. The DPW algorithm can be
used to enhance the pronunciation dictionaries of the well-known languages like English or to
build pronunciation dictionaries to the less known sparse languages. The precision
measurement experiments show 88.9% accuracy.