Truncation, Wildcards, and Word Stemming

Truncation

Truncation allows you to search for a term and its variations by entering a minimum of the first three letters of the term followed by an asterisk *.

Note:Truncation is currently set to read a limit of 1024 word stems and will result in an error message if the user enters a truncation query that is too general.

If you enter:	You retrieve:
regulat*	records containing regulation, regulations, regulating, and regulatory
telecomm*	records containing telecommunications, telecommuting, and telecommuters

Wildcards

Wildcards are used to represent from zero to nine additional characters in a search term. They are useful when you are unsure of spelling, when there are alternate spellings, or when you only know part of a term.

• A question mark ? represents a single character.
• An asterisk * represents from zero to nine additional characters.

Note: Wildcards can only be used after the second character of a term.

If you enter:	You retrieve:
te?t	records containing test and text
rec*le	records containing reconfigurable, recycle, and receptacle

Word Stemming

Note: Word Stemming of search terms is not automatic. You must use the truncation symbol.

---

Related topics:

• New Search / Simple Search
• Advanced Search
• Boolean Searching
• Phrase Searching
• Adjacent terms (proximity)
• Stopwords