Whoosh

Whoosh is an English onomatopoeic term used to represent the sound of air rushing past or something moving quickly. In comics, film, and writing, it is used as a sound effect to convey speed, swift motion, or disappearance.

In popular media, the word is often stylized as whoosh or swoosh and appears in captions, dialogue balloons, or as part of on-screen effects. The term is not tied to a single franchise or product; it is a general descriptive sound.

Whoosh is also the name of an open-source, pure-Python library for full-text indexing and searching. It provides tools to create an inverted index from text, define fields, and perform queries against stored documents. The library emphasizes ease of use and portability, making it suitable for embedded search in applications, content management systems, or small websites.

It offers configurable analyzers, tokenizers, and filters for text processing, plus a query parser, result ranking, and basic features such as highlighting and stored fields. Whoosh is implemented entirely in Python, with no compiled dependencies, and is distributed under a permissive license. It is generally used for smaller-scale search tasks rather than large-scale web search engines.