Working for #2618 I found that if you type a first letter of the word, the match works but the highlighting shows another matching letter if any. 1. Go to http://harvesthq.github.io/chosen/ 2. Type r in the first dropdow 3. Will match "Central Africa Republic" but will highlight the r in central. BTW, I also fixed this, see https://github.com/hanoii/chosen/compare/transliteration...hanoii:highlight-first-word But it's based on #2618 so waiting for that to happen.