Full-text search is an extremely useful tool for many applications. One popular feature is partial word searching. To search for partial words, we can store variable-length sequences of words in a search engine. Another word for a variable-length sequence of a word is an n-gram.

If we break up the word “sun” into n-grams, we get: s, su, sun, u, un, n. If we store these n-grams in a search engine and associate them all to the word sun, we’ll be able to find any documents containing the word sun by searching for any of these n-grams.

Elasticsearch is a…