How to query Wikidata items using its labels?

Question

How can I query Wikidata to get all items that have labels contain a word? I tried this but didn\'t work; it retrieved nothing.

SELECT ?item ?itemLabel WHERE {
          


        

Answer 1

As of today (June 2020), the best way to do this seems to be using these CirrusSearch extensions. The following does a substring search in all English labels and comes back with 10,000 results in <20 seconds. I believe it also searches in aliases and descriptions.

SELECT DISTINCT ?item ?label
WHERE
{
  SERVICE wikibase:mwapi
  {
    bd:serviceParam wikibase:endpoint "www.wikidata.org";
                    wikibase:api "Generator";
                    mwapi:generator "search";
                    mwapi:gsrsearch "inlabel:city"@en;
                    mwapi:gsrlimit "max".
    ?item wikibase:apiOutputItem mwapi:title.
  }
  ?item rdfs:label ?label. FILTER( LANG(?label)="en" )

}