Wildcard Query

Matches documents that have fields matching a wildcard expression. Supported wildcards are *, which matches any character sequence (including the empty one), and ?, which matches any single character. Note that this query can be slow, as it needs to iterate over many terms. In order to prevent extremely slow wildcard queries, a wildcard term should not start with one of the wildcards * or ?.

This allows for prefix matches, matching any number of trailing characters, so, for instance, "wildc*" would match wildcard, wildcarded, wildcards, wildcat, wildcats, etc.

This is a bit different from Partial Query. Partial is intended for “incremental search”.

Example

SEARCH /bank/

{
  "_query": {
    "favoriteFruit": {
      "_wildcard": "ba"
    }
  }
}

A similar effect could be obtained by using the wildcard (“*”) character as part of the query text:

SEARCH /bank/

{
  "_query": {
    "favoriteFruit": "ba*"
  }
}