Calculating a relative Levenshtein distance - make sense?

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I am using both Daitch-Mokotoff soundexing and Damerau-Levenshtein to find out if a user entry and a value in the application are "the same".

Is Levenshtein distance supposed to be used as an absolute value? If I have a 20 letter word, a distance of 4 is not so bad. If the word has 4 letters...

What I am now doing is taking the distance / length to get a distance that better reflects what percentage of the word has been changed.

Is that a valid/proven approach? Or is it plain stupid?

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