Trigram search is a method of searching for text when the exact syntax or spelling of the target object is not precisely known[1] or when queries may be regular expressions.
[2] It finds objects which match the maximum number of three consecutive character strings (i.e. trigrams) in the entered search terms, which are generally near matches.
[5][6] A threshold for number of trigram matches can be specified as a cutoff point, after a result is unmatched.
The trigrams of the string would be "ali", "lic", and "ice", not including spaces.
[5] Searching for this string in a database with a trigram-based index would involve finding which objects contain as many of the three trigrams as possible.