> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://lesp.gitbook.io/lesp/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://lesp.gitbook.io/lesp/words/get-similarity-score.md).

# Get Similarity Score

So, let's imagine that you want to simply compare two words, without running `get_similar` on a wordlist. There is a method that is far more lightweight than `get_similar` for this purpose, called `get_similarity_score`. It takes two words as arguments and returns a float between 0 and 1, where 0 means that the words are completely different and 1 means that the words are exactly the same. The score is calculated using the Levenshtein distance algorithm. Here's an example:

```python
from lesp import Proofreader

proofreader = Proofreader()

print(proofreader.get_similarity_score("hello", "helo")) # 0.8
print(proofreader.get_similarity_score("hello", "hello")) # 1.0
print(proofreader.get_similarity_score("hello", "world")) # 0.0
```

This usually doesn't take more than a few milliseconds to run, so it's a good option if you want to do this job quickly. `get_similar` actually uses this method itself, but due to the fact that it has to compare the word with every word in the wordlist, it takes a lot more time to run (still not that much, though).