jjeong

Multi-value fields and the inverted index

The fact that all field types support multi-value fields out of the box is a consequence of the origins of Lucene. Lucene was designed to be a full text search engine. In order to be able to search for individual words within a big block of text, Lucene tokenizes the text into individual terms, and adds each term to the inverted index separately.

This means that even a simple text field must be able to support multiple values by default. When other datatypes were added, such as numbers and dates, they used the same data structure as strings, and so got multi-values for free.