We propose a new scheme for VQ codebook search. The procedure is in between the binary-tree-search and full-search and thus might be called N-ary search of a codebook. Through the experiment performed on 7200 frames spoken by 25 speakers, we confirmed that the best codewords as good as by the full-search were obtained at moderate time consumption comparable to the binary-tree-search. In application to speech recognition by HMM/VQ with Bakis model, where appearance of a specific codeword is essential in the parameter training phase, the method proposed here is expected to provide an efficient training procedure.