---
title: Phrase
description: Phrase queries are like match queries, but with order and position of matching tokens enforced
canonical: https://docs.paradedb.com/documentation/full-text/phrase
---

Phrase queries work exactly like [match conjunction](/documentation/full-text/match#match-conjunction), but are more strict in that they require the
order and position of tokens to be the same.

Suppose our query is `running shoes`, and we want to omit results like
`running sleek shoes` or `shoes running` — these results contain the right tokens, but not in the exact order and position
that the query specifies.

Enter the `###` phrase operator:

```sql
INSERT INTO mock_items (description, rating, category) VALUES
('running sleek shoes', 5, 'Footwear'),
('shoes running', 5, 'Footwear');

SELECT description, rating, category
FROM mock_items
WHERE description ### 'running shoes';
```

This query returns:

```csv
     description     | rating | category
---------------------+--------+----------
 Sleek running shoes |      5 | Footwear
(1 row)
```

Note that `running sleek shoes` and `shoes running` did not match the phrase `running shoes` despite having the tokens `running` and
`shoes` because they appear in the wrong order or with other words in between.

## How It Works

Let's look at what happens under the hood for the above phrase query:

1. Retrieves the tokenizer configuration of the `description` column. In this example,
   let's assume `description` uses the [unicode](/documentation/tokenizers/available-tokenizers/unicode) tokenizer.
2. Tokenizes the query string with the same tokenizer. This means `running shoes` becomes two tokens: `running` and `shoes`.
3. Finds all rows where `description` contains `running` immediately followed by `shoes`.

## Examples

Let’s consider a few more hypothetical documents to see whether they would be returned by the phrase query.
These examples assume that index uses the default tokenizer and token filters, and that the query is
`running shoes`.

| Original Text       | Tokens                    | Match | Reason                                         | Related                                                               |
| ------------------- | ------------------------- | ----- | ---------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Sleek running shoes | `sleek` `running` `shoes` | ✅    | Contains `running` and `shoes`, in that order. |
| Running shoes sleek | `sleek` `running` `shoes` | ❌    | `running` and `shoes` not in the right order.  | [Match conjunction](/documentation/full-text/match#match-conjunction) |
| SLeeK RUNNING ShOeS | `sleek` `running` `shoes` | ✅    | Contains `running` and `shoes`, in that order. | [Lowercasing](/documentation/indexing)                                |
| Sleek run shoe      | `sleek` `run` `shoe`      | ❌    | Does not contain both `running` and `shoes`.   | [Stemming](/documentation/indexing)                                   |
| Sleke ruining shoez | `sleke` `ruining` `shoez` | ❌    | Does not contain both `running` and `shoes`.   |
| White jogging shoes | `white` `jogging` `shoes` | ❌    | Does not contain both `running` and `shoes`.   |

## Adding Slop

Slop allows the token ordering requirement of phrase queries to be relaxed. It specifies how many changes — like extra words in between or transposed word positions — are allowed while still considering the phrase a match:

- An extra word in between (e.g. `sleek shoes` vs. `sleek running shoes`) has a slop of `1`
- A transposition (e.g. `running shoes` vs. `shoes running`) has a slop of `2`

To apply slop to a phrase query, cast the query to `slop(n)`, where `n` is the maximum allowed slop.

```sql
SELECT description, rating, category
FROM mock_items
WHERE description ### 'shoes running'::pdb.slop(2);
```

## Using a Custom Tokenizer

The phrase query supports custom query tokenization.

```sql
SELECT description, rating, category
FROM mock_items
WHERE description ### 'running shoes'::pdb.whitespace;
```

## Using Pretokenized Text

The phrase operator also accepts a text array as the right-hand side argument. If a text array is provided, each element of the array is treated as an exact token,
which means that no further processing is done.

The following query matches documents containing the token `shoes` immediately followed by `running`:

```sql
SELECT description, rating, category
FROM mock_items
WHERE description ### ARRAY['running', 'shoes'];
```

Adding slop is supported:

```sql
SELECT description, rating, category
FROM mock_items
WHERE description ### ARRAY['shoes', 'running']::pdb.slop(2);
```
