# Wildcard searching on mult-word phrase

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/wildcard-searching-on-mult-word-phrase/215480>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [January 17, 2020, 2:51pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/wildcard-searching-on-mult-word-phrase/215480 "2020-01-17T14:51:54Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![cas4](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6a8cbe/32.png) [@cas4](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/cas4)\
**Post date:** [January 17, 2020, 2:51pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/wildcard-searching-on-mult-word-phrase/215480/1 "2020-01-17T14:51:55Z")

</div>

I have a particular document that contains _North American_ and _North America's_ but not _North America_. I'm trying to come up with a query string syntax that will return all _North America_ records trying a query similar to the following:

```
POST movies/_search
{
    "query": {
        "query_string": {
            "fields": ["title"],
            "query": "\"north america*\""
        }
    }
}

```

After some reading, it appears that wildcards are not allowed inside quotes. If that is truly the case, is there some alternative to searching for a phrase where one of the words is not an exact match? Reading this article [Learn Elasticsearch Stemming with Example](https://mindmajix.com/elasticsearch/learn-elasticsearch-stemming-with-example), it appears using the English analyzer in parallel to the Standard analyzer might be an approach. This seems awfully expensive as each string field would be indexed twice.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [February 14, 2020, 2:51pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/wildcard-searching-on-mult-word-phrase/215480/2 "2020-02-14T14:51:57Z")

</div>

Closed on February 14, 2020, 2:51pm UTC

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