Luene's own SpanFirstQuey takes another SpanQuery instance as one of it's two constructor arguments. This allows what I think is the Lucene best practice for a "starts with" query such (pseudo code, not tested): term1 = new SpanTermQuery(new Term("title", "ready")) term2 = new SpanTermQuery(new Term("title", "steady")) term3 = new SpanTermQuery(new Term("title", "go")) near = new SpanNearQuery({term1, term2, term3}, 1, true) startsWith = new SpanFirstQuery(near, 1) But this isn't possible with CompassQueryBuilder#startsWith, since that method only takes an object term value, rather than another CompassSpanQuery. It would be possible if CompassQueryBuilder#startsWith had an overloaded version taking a CompassSpanQuery built with CompassQueryBuilder#spanNear. Also a "starts with" query builder would be a nice feature to support in a simplified format, eg, CompassQueryBuilder could have a method returning CompassStartsWithQueryBuilder with an "add" method to add terms. However, this technique only works for whole terms - it's NOT a prefix query - so the name you choose and documentation would have to make that clear.