Typo tolerance settings

This article describes each of the typo tolerance settings.

Typo tolerance helps users find relevant results even when their search queries contain spelling mistakes or typos, for example, typing phnoe instead of phone. You can configure the typo tolerance feature for each index.

enabled

Typo tolerance is enabled by default, but you can disable it if needed:

cURL

curl \
  -X PATCH 'MEILISEARCH_URL/indexes/movies/settings/typo-tolerance' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data-binary '{ "enabled": false }'

With typo tolerance disabled, Meilisearch no longer considers words that are a few characters off from your query terms as matches. For example, a query for phnoe will no longer return a document containing the word phone.

In most cases, keeping typo tolerance enabled results in a better search experience. Massive or multilingual datasets may be exceptions, as typo tolerance can cause false-positive matches in these cases.

minWordSizeForTypos

By default, Meilisearch accepts one typo for query terms containing five or more characters, and up to two typos if the term is at least nine characters long.

If your dataset contains seven, searching for sevem or sevan will match seven. But tow won’t match two as it’s less than 5 characters.

You can override these default settings using the minWordSizeForTypos object. The code sample below sets the minimum word size for one typo to 4 and the minimum word size for two typos to 10.

cURL

curl \
  -X PATCH 'MEILISEARCH_URL/indexes/movies/settings/typo-tolerance' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data-binary '{
    "minWordSizeForTypos": {
      "oneTypo": 4,
      "twoTypos": 10
    }
  }'

When updating the minWordSizeForTypos object, keep in mind that:

• oneTypo must be greater than or equal to 0 and less than or equal to twoTypos
• twoTypos must be greater than or equal to oneTypo and less than or equal to 255

To put it another way: 0 ≤ oneTypo ≤ twoTypos ≤ 255.

We recommend keeping the value of oneTypo between 2 and 8 and the value of twoTypos between 4 and 14. If either value is too low, you may get a large number of false-positive results. On the other hand, if both values are set too high, many search queries may not benefit from typo tolerance.

Typo on the first character
Meilisearch considers a typo on a query’s first character as two typos.

Concatenation
When considering possible candidates for typo tolerance, Meilisearch will concatenate multiple search terms separated by a space separator. This is treated as one typo. For example, a search for any way would match documents containing anyway.

For more about typo calculations, see below.

disableOnWords

You can disable typo tolerance for a list of query terms by adding them to disableOnWords. disableOnWords is case insensitive.

cURL

curl \
  -X PATCH 'MEILISEARCH_URL/indexes/movies/settings/typo-tolerance' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data-binary '{
    "disableOnWords": [
      "shrek"
    ]
  }'

Meilisearch won’t apply typo tolerance on the query term Shrek or shrek at search time to match documents.

disableOnAttributes

You can disable typo tolerance for a specific document attribute by adding it to disableOnAttributes. The code sample below disables typo tolerance for title:

cURL

curl \
  -X PATCH 'MEILISEARCH_URL/indexes/movies/settings/typo-tolerance' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data-binary '{ "disableOnAttributes": ["title"] }'

With the above settings, matches in the title attribute will not tolerate any typos. For example, a search for beautiful (9 characters) will not match the movie “Biutiful” starring Javier Bardem. With the default settings, this would be a match.

disableOnNumbers

You can disable typo tolerance for all numeric values across all indexes and search requests by setting disableOnNumbers to true:

By default, typo tolerance on numerical values is turned on. This may lead to false positives, such as a search for 2024 matching documents containing 2025 or 2004.

When disableOnNumbers is set to true, queries with numbers only return exact matches. Besides reducing the number of false positives, disabling typo tolerance on numbers may also improve indexing performance.