Vector quantization(VQ) is widely used in many high-quality and high-rate data compression applications such as speech coding, audio coding, image coding and video coding. When the size of a VQ codebook is large, the computational complexity for the full codeword search method is a significant problem for many applications. A number of complexity reduction algorithms have been proposed and investigated using such properties of the codebook as the triangle inequality. This paper proposes a new fast VQ search algorithm that is based on a multi-stage structure for searching for the best codeword. Even using only two stages, a significant complexity reduction can be obtained without any loss of quality.