Synonyms

The synonyms feature allows you to define search terms that should be considered equivalent. For eg: when you define a synonym for sneaker as shoe, searching for sneaker will now return all records with the word shoe in them, in addition to records with the word sneaker.

Typesense supports two types of synonyms:

1. One-way synonyms: Defining the words iphone and android as one-way synonyms of smart phone will cause searches for smart phone to return documents containing iphone or android or both.

2. Multi-way synonyms: Defining the words blazer, coat and jacket as multi-way synonyms will cause searches for any one of those words (eg: coat) to return documents containing at least one of the words in the synonym set (eg: records with blazer or coat or jacket are returned).

Precedence

When using Synonyms and Overrides together, Overrides are handled first since the rules can contain instructions to replace the query. Synonyms will then work on the modified query.

Locale-specific synonyms

When a synonym has a locale specified, it will only be applied when searching fields with a matching locale. If no locale is specified for a synonym, it will be applied globally. This helps manage cases where the same word has different meanings across languages.

Phrase Match Queries & Filtering

Synonyms are not triggered when using Phrase Search or Filtering, by design.

So for eg, "Site Reliability" will not return results containing Infrastructure even if they are defined as multi-way synonyms, because of the double quotes around "Site Reliability" which makes it a phrase search. So only documents that contain that exact full phrase are returned, without any synonym matches.

Also, synonyms are only applied to the tokens in the q search parameter, and not to any tokens in the filter_by parameter. For eg, if you define a multi-way synonym for abc <> xyz and use filter_by: title:=abc, it will only match documents where title=abc, not title=xyz, because filtering is designed to be similar to a SQL WHERE condition to do a structured query and synonyms don't apply to filters.

Create or update a synonym

Multi-way synonym

Sample Response

One-way synonym

Sample Response

Definition

PUT ${TYPESENSE_HOST}/collections/:collection/synonyms/:id

Arguments

Parameter	Required	Description
synonyms	yes	Array of words that should be considered as synonyms.
root	no	For 1-way synonyms, indicates the root word that words in the synonyms parameter map to.
locale	no	Locale for the synonym. If specified, the synonym will only be applied when searching a field that has a matching locale. If not specified, the synonym will be applied globally.
symbols_to_index	no	By default, special characters are dropped from synonyms. Use this attribute to specify which special characters should be indexed as is.

Retrieve a synonym

We can retrieve a single synonym.

Sample Response

Definition

GET ${TYPESENSE_HOST}/collections/:collection/synonyms/:id

List all synonyms

List all synonyms associated with a given collection.

NOTE: By default, ALL synonyms are returned, but you can use the offset and limit parameters to paginate on the listing.

Sample Response

Definition

GET ${TYPESENSE_HOST}/collections/:collection/synonyms

Delete a synonym

Delete a synonym associated with a collection.

Sample Response

Definition

DELETE ${TYPESENSE_HOST}/collections/:collection/synonyms/:id