# Autocomplete of single words
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/autocomplete-of-single-words/31326
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [September 29, 2015, 10:39am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/autocomplete-of-single-words/31326 "2015-09-29T10:39:24Z")
**Posts on this page:** 7
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@cardea](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/cardea)
#### Post date: [September 29, 2015, 10:39am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/autocomplete-of-single-words/31326/1 "2015-09-29T10:39:24Z")
Hi, everyone,
following problem: I want to have an autocompletion of single words. This means: if I type in "bor", I want to get "boring (num: 29)" and "border (num: 10)" back. "border" and "boring" are parts of several large texts. I do not want to get the whole text, just the number of documents there "boring" and "border" occurs and - of course - the terms "boring" and "border".
I think I have to use [https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/search-suggesters-completion.html](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/search-suggesters-completion.html) to get this. But all examples are about fulltext-results. So - how do I get he fragments I want?
Thanks and best,
Ernesto
---
### Author:  [@softwaredoug](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/softwaredoug)
#### Post date: [September 29, 2015, 4:16pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/autocomplete-of-single-words/31326/2 "2015-09-29T16:16:24Z")
Do you want a list of snippets where it occurs? Or do you want a breakdown of all the terms in the index that start with `bor` by count?
The former sounds like a highlighting problem. The latter sounds like a [terms aggregration](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/search-aggregations-bucket-terms-aggregation.html) with a [prefix filter](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/1.4/query-dsl-prefix-filter.html). I've used the latter for single term autocomplete before. It can work depending on the size of your index and term dictionary (ie number of unique terms).
---
### Author:  [@cardea](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/cardea)
#### Post date: [September 29, 2015, 5:07pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/autocomplete-of-single-words/31326/3 "2015-09-29T17:07:52Z")
I want a list of all the terms in the index starting with bor.
when i have these 6 datasets:
"blah is blubb boring"
"blah is blah"
"boring is border booooo"
"narf is border"
"border is boring"
"blah is border blaaaaaah"
and I search for "bor" I want to have boring: 3, border: 4 as result. My problem is especially how to get the full terms.
---
### Author:  [@davidbkemp](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/davidbkemp)
#### Post date: [October 2, 2015, 5:44am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/autocomplete-of-single-words/31326/4 "2015-10-02T05:44:18Z")
Using a terms agg with filtering may satisfy what you need. Note that you need to put the prefix text in both the query and in the agg filter:
```
{
"query": {
"match_phrase_prefix": {
"name": "bor"
}
},
"size": 0,
"aggs": {
"myagg": {
"terms": {
"field": "name",
"include": "bor.*",
"size": 0
}
}
}
}
```
See this for more details:
[https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/search-aggregations-bucket-terms-aggregation.html#\_filtering\_values](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/search-aggregations-bucket-terms-aggregation.html#_filtering_values)
Here is a working shell script (works for Elasticsearch 1.7.2):
```
curl -XDELETE "http://localhost:9200/foo"
curl -XPUT "http://localhost:9200/foo" -d'
{
"mappings": {
"foo": {
"properties": {
"name": {
"type": "string"
}
}
}
}
}'
curl -XPOST "http://localhost:9200/foo/foo/_bulk" -d'
{"index":{}}
{ "name" : "blah is blubb boring" }
{"index":{}}
{ "name" : "blah is blah" }
{"index":{}}
{ "name" : "boring is border booooo" }
{"index":{}}
{ "name" : "narf is border" }
{"index":{}}
{ "name" : "border is boring" }
{"index":{}}
{ "name" : "blah is border blaaaaaah" }
'
curl -XGET "http://localhost:9200/foo/_refresh"
echo
curl -XGET "http://localhost:9200/foo/foo/_search?pretty=true" -d'
{
"query": {
"match_phrase_prefix": {
"name": "bor"
}
},
"size": 0,
"aggs": {
"myagg": {
"terms": {
"field": "name",
"include": "bor.*",
"size": 0
}
}
}
}'
```
This gives:
```
"aggregations" : {
"myagg" : {
"doc_count_error_upper_bound" : 0,
"sum_other_doc_count" : 0,
"buckets" : [ {
"key" : "border",
"doc_count" : 4
}, {
"key" : "boring",
"doc_count" : 3
} ]
}
```
---
### Author:  [@davidbkemp](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/davidbkemp)
#### Post date: [October 2, 2015, 5:46am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/autocomplete-of-single-words/31326/5 "2015-10-02T05:46:14Z")
As follow up: using edge ngrams is likely to be faster than "match\_phrase\_prefix"
---
### Author:  [@cardea](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/cardea)
#### Post date: [October 15, 2015, 12:57pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/autocomplete-of-single-words/31326/6 "2015-10-15T12:57:59Z")
Late reply, but: thank! After some failures because of bad list definitions in my model it works now - and it's really fast, even with match\_phrase\_prefix. 🙂 But I think, I'll test ngrams soon.
---
### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [July 5, 2017, 11:44pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/autocomplete-of-single-words/31326/7 "2017-07-05T23:44:37Z")