ICANN has a tool that they’ve made available which does a variety of algorithmic tests against an existing library of reserved words and root-listed Top Level Domains, so that a potential applicant can determine a likely conflict against those strings. It’s called the Sword Algorithm, and you can test it out with the TLDs you’re thinking of.
The point of the algorithm is to help evaluators determine if a proposed TLD string is identical or confusingly similar to an existing TLD or to another proposed TLD. Unfortunately, the tool doesn’t work very well. Fortunately, ICANN is not relying on it too much. It is now a mere aid to human evaluators.
The process is called string contention, and ICANN has documented how that process would work under the new TLD process.
Some of the techniques used are visual similarity, levenshtein distance, keyboard vector and soundex.
