Abstract: A system and method provides for indexing and retrieval of stored documents using a decomposition of words in the documents in n-grams, or linear word subunits. The documents are indexed as pages in a number of banks. For each bank there is a bank index. The individual n-grams are identified for each page are stored in the bank index. Each bank index further contains an entry map that indicates whether a given n-gram is present in any of the pages of the bank, and then provides an index to a page map that further indicates which page in the bank contains the n-gram. When a search query is input, the query words are decomposed into their n-grams. The query word n-grams are compared first with entry maps to determine if the query word n-grams appear on any page in the bank. If so, the associated page map is traversed to determine which page in the bank contains the query word n-grams. The n-grams on the page are compared with the query word n-grams to determine the presence of an match therebetween.