Trademark Acceptable Identification of Goods & Services

Trademarks > Trademark Manual of Examining Procedure

Logical and Proximity Operators

The logical and proximity operators for keyword searches are described in the following table. These operators are included with the search engine, but the limited size of the Manual of Examining Procedure generally negates any necessity for using these operators for finding the examining procedure.

Operator	Meaning
AND	Boolean AND - Records retrieved will contain the each of the search terms specified. The order of occurrence of the search terms in the record is not restricted.
OR	Boolean OR - Records retrieved will contain at least one of the search terms specified.
NOT	Boolean NOT - Records retrieved will not include the search term following the NOT operator. NOT may be used with the SAME or WITH operators to retrieve documents that contain the first term but do not contain the second term in the same paragraph or sentence.
XOR	Exclusive OR - For two search terms, records will include either the first term or the second term, but not both.
SAME	The search terms occur in the same paragraph.
WITH	The search terms occur in the same sentence.
ADJ#	The search terms occur in the adjacent to each other in the order specified in the search. A numeric qualifier (1-99) can be appended to ADJ to allow additional words to be between the two search terms.
NEAR#	The search terms occur in the same sentence within the specified number of words of each other. For example, the search DOG NEAR2 CAT will retrieve records for which the words DOG and CAT appear in the same sentence with at most one word between them in any order.

Operator Precedence:

For longer search statements, the precedence order, from highest to lowest, is as follows:

ADJ, NEAR (highest precedence)
WITH
SAME
AND, NOT, NOT SAME, NOT WITH, NOT NEAR, NOT ADJ
XOR
OR (lowest precedence)

Return to main help page.

KEY:

=online business system

=fees

=forms

=help

=laws/regulations

=definition (glossary)

Call the Trademark Assistance Center at 703.308.9000 for help on trademark matters. Send questions about USPTO programs and services to the USPTO Contact Center (UCC). You can suggest USPTO webpages or material you would like featured on this section by E-mail to the webmaster@uspto.gov. While we cannot promise to accommodate all requests, your suggestions will be considered and may lead to other improvements on the website.