# Understanding doc and docCount values in explain response

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/understanding-doc-and-doccount-values-in-explain-response/158383>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [November 27, 2018, 4:41pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/understanding-doc-and-doccount-values-in-explain-response/158383 "2018-11-27T16:41:19Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 2

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**Author:** ![s1monw](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/s1monw/32/3637_2.png) [@s1monw](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/s1monw)\
**Post date:** [November 30, 2018, 10:47am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/understanding-doc-and-doccount-values-in-explain-response/158383/2 "2018-11-30T10:47:47Z")

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hey, lemme try to explain:

- `doc` is the internal docID. it's totally irrelevant to you it's the Nth document in a segment.
- `docCount` is the total number of documents that have at least one term in the field. For simplicity you can think of it as the number of docs in you index
- `docs.deleted` is the number of documents marked as deleted. We take them still into account when we score ie. `docCount` will contain deleted docs.

hope this helps

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