Stopwords

Stopwords are common words (like “the”, “and”, “is”) that are excluded from search queries to improve relevance. Define per-locale stopword sets and apply them selectively to queries.

Create a Stopword Set

PUT /stopwords/english_stopwords
Content-Type: application/json
X-TYPESENSE-API-KEY: YOUR_API_KEY

{
  "stopwords": ["the", "a", "an", "and", "or", "but", "in", "on", "at", "to", "for", "of", "is", "it"],
  "locale": "en"
}

Parameters

Field	Type	Description
`stopwords`	string[]	Array of words to exclude from search queries.
`locale`	string	Language code for this stopword set (e.g., `en`, `sv`).

Using Stopwords in Search

Specify which stopword set to apply with the stopwords parameter:

GET /collections/products/documents/search?\
q=the best running shoes&query_by=title&stopwords=english_stopwords
X-TYPESENSE-API-KEY: YOUR_API_KEY

With the stopword set above, the query “the best running shoes” would be processed as “best running shoes” since “the” is a stopword.

Note: Stopwords are applied at query time only, not during indexing. All words are still indexed — stopwords simply prevent common terms from being included in the search.

List Stopword Sets

GET /stopwords
X-TYPESENSE-API-KEY: YOUR_API_KEY

Get a Stopword Set

GET /stopwords/english_stopwords
X-TYPESENSE-API-KEY: YOUR_API_KEY

Delete a Stopword Set

DELETE /stopwords/english_stopwords
X-TYPESENSE-API-KEY: YOUR_API_KEY

Persistence

Stopword sets are persisted to disk and restored on server restart.