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Stop words are the most common words in a language, such as “the”, “that”, and “it” in English. These words don’t give useful clues in a search. They appear in many and can cause false positives in search results. The removeStopWords parameter controls whether Algolia removes stop words from the . Turn it on if your users search with stop words or natural language, as in voice search. Leave it off if they search with keywords only. The index’s query language then decides which dictionaries apply. With no query language set, removeStopWords applies to every supported language. Algolia provides a built-in stop-word dictionary for each supported language. In the Algolia dashboard, you can add your own words to these dictionaries. Each Algolia uses one stop-word dictionary per language. To ignore words in one only, use the optionalWords parameter.

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Open a stop-word dictionary

Whenever you want to inspect, turn off, delete, add, or upload custom stop words, start with these steps.
  1. Go to the Algolia dashboard and select your Algolia .
  2. In the left sidebar, select Search.
  3. Go to the Dictionaries page.
  4. Select the language you want to customize.
  5. Select the Words Ignored tab.

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Inspect stop words

Open a stop-word dictionary and:
  • To find one stop word, type it in the search box.
  • To narrow the list, select Filter, then select a Filter by status or Filter by type option.

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Turn off and delete stop words

A stop word can matter for your use case. For example, if your catalog has down jackets and other jackets, queries must keep “down” to return relevant results. To keep a word in the query, you can turn off the stop-word entry. To turn off or delete stop words:
  1. Open a stop-word dictionary.
  2. Search for the stop word.
  3. To turn off the stop word (keep it in the query), select Disable.
  4. To delete a custom stop word, select Remove.
    You can’t delete a built-in stop word. You can only turn it off.
  5. Select Review and Save.

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Add custom stop words

  1. Open a stop-word dictionary.
  2. Search for the word.
  3. If the word doesn’t exist, select Add as a custom stop word.
  4. Select Review and Save.

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Create your own stop-word dictionary

To apply only your own stop words, turn off all the built-in stop words first. Then add your words one at a time, or upload them in bulk. You must choose which language’s dictionary to customize. Set that language as the index’s queryLanguages and turn on removeStopWords. Open a stop-word dictionary, then select Actions:
  • To turn off the built-in stop words, select Disable Algolia words.
  • To upload your own list, select Upload your list of words.
  • To export what you added, select Download the list of your custom words as JSON or as CSV.

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Upload format

Every row needs all five columns, and type must be custom. In CSV, don’t put a space after a comma. The dashboard matches the header row character for character, so language doesn’t match language, and the upload skips the rows it can’t match.

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Manage stop words programmatically

The dashboard isn’t the only way to customize a dictionary: Turning off the built-in words is a dictionary setting, not an entry. Use algolia dictionary settings, the set dictionary settings method, or the dictionary settings endpoint.
Last modified on August 25, 2026