Abstract: A method and system are provided for approximate string matching of a target string to a trie data structure. The trie data structure has a root node and generations of child nodes each node representing at least one character in an alphabet to provide a lexicon of words and word fragments. The method involves traversing the trie data structure starting from the root node by comparing each node of a branch of the trie data structure to characters in the target string and adding characters traversed in a branch of the trie data structure to a gathered string to provide suggestions of approximate matches. If the method reaches a node flagged as a node for a word or a word fragment and, if the target string is longer than the gathered string, the method loops back to the root node, and continues the traverse from the root node. This enables the trie data structure to use word fragments for compound words and to split non-delimited words where appropriate.