Search for short words with SOLR

First of all, try to understand why your words don't get indexed by solr using the "Analysis Tool"

http://localhost:8080/solr/admin/analysis.jsp

Just put the field and the text you are searching for and see which analyser is filtering your short term. I suggest you to do so because you said you have only a "suspect" and you have to be certain about which analyser filters your data.

Then why don't you just simply copy the term in another field without that analyser?

In this way your terms will be indexed twice, and will appear both as exact word and as n-gram. Then you have to deal with the scores of the two different fields.

I hope this has helped you in some way.

Some link for aggregation and copyfield attribute:

Indexing data in multiple fields

Using copy field tag