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Configure and Manage Stopwords and Stoplists for Full-Text Search


To prevent a full-text index from becoming bloated, SQL Server has a mechanism that discards commonly occurring strings that do not help the search. These discarded strings are called stopwords. During index creation, the Full-Text Engine omits stopwords from the full-text index. This means that full-text queries will not search on stopwords.

A stopword can be a word with meaning in a specific language, or it can be a token that does not have linguistic meaning. For example, in the English language, words such as "a," "and," "is," and "the" are left out of the full-text index since they are known to be useless to a search.

Although it ignores the inclusion of stopwords, the full-text index does take into account their position. For example, consider the phrase, "Instructions are applicable to these Adventure Works Cycles models". The following table depicts the position of the words in the phrase:





















The stopwords "are", "to", and "these" that are in positions 2, 4, and 5 are left out of the full-text index. However, their positional information is maintained, thereby leaving the position of the other words in the phrase unaffected.

Stopwords are managed in databases using objects called stoplists. A stoplist is a list of stopwords that, when associated with a full-text index, is applied to full-text queries on that index.


You can create a stoplist in any of the following ways:

  • Using the system-supplied stoplist in the database. SQL Server ships with a system stoplist that contains the most commonly used stopwords for each supported language, that is for every language that is associated with given word breakers by default. The system stoplist contains common stopwords for all supported languages. You can copy the system stoplist, and customize your copy by adding and removing stopwords.

    The system stoplist is installed in the Resource database.

  • Creating your own stoplist, and then adding stopwords to it for any language that you specify. You can also drop stopwords from your stoplist when necessary.

  • Using an existing custom stoplist from any other database in the current server instance and then adding and dropping stopwords as necessary.

To create a stoplist

To create a full-text stoplist in Management Studio

  1. In Object Explorer, expand the server.

  2. Expand Databases, and then expand the database in which you want to create the full-text stoplist.

  3. Expand Storage, and then right-click Full-Text Stoplists.

  4. Select New Full-Text Stoplist.

  5. Specify the stoplist name.

  6. Optionally, specify someone else as the stoplist owner.

  7. Select one of the following create stoplist options:

    • Create an empty stoplist

    • Create from the system stoplist

    • Create from an existing full-text stoplist

    For more information, see New Full-Text Stoplist (General Page).

  8. Click OK.  

To drop a stoplist


To make use of a stoplist in queries, you must associate it with a full-text index. You can attach a stoplist to a full-text index when you create the index, or you can alter the index later to add a stoplist.

To create a full-text index and associate a stoplist with it

To associate or disassociate a stoplist with an existing full-text index

To suppress an error message if stopwords cause a Boolean operation on a full-text query to fail


To view all the stopwords of a stoplist

To get information about all the stoplists in the current database

To view the tokenization result of a word breaker, thesaurus, and stoplist combination


To add or drop stopwords from a stoplist

To change the stopwords in a stoplist in Management Studio

  1. In Object Explorer, expand the server.

  2. Expand Databases, and then expand the database.

  3. Expand Storage, and then select Full Text Stoplists.

  4. Right-click the stoplist whose properties you want to change, and select Properties.

  5. In the Full-Text Stoplist Properties dialog box:

    1. In the Action list box, select one of the following actions: Add stopword, Delete stopword, Delete all stopwords, or Clear stoplist.

    2. If the Stopword text box is enabled for the selected action, enter a single stopword. This stopword must be unique; that is, not yet in this stoplist for the language that you select.

    3. If the Full-text language list box is enabled for the selected action, select a language.

  6. Click OK.  


SQL Server 2005 noise words have been replaced by stopwords. When a database is upgraded from SQL Server 2005, the noise-word files are no longer used. However, the noise-word files are stored in the FTDATA\ FTNoiseThesaurusBak folder, and you can use them later when updating or building the corresponding stoplists. For information about upgrading noise-word files to stoplists, see Upgrade Full-Text Search.


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