Special characters, hyphens, and case

Special characters

If you want to use a Find Word or Full Text search to look for a word with an accented letter (e.g. café) simply type a plain letter in place of the accented one (e.g. cafe).

The most common special characters (e.g. the Old English thorn and Middle English yogh) are treated as equivalent to the nearest plain alphabet characters (e.g. th or y). If in doubt, use a wildcard in place of the special character.

Pronunciations are shown in the standard characters of the International Phonetic Alphabet. These are searchable via a special pronunciations search area available on the Advanced search page. The Key to the pronunciation explains the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and describes how to search for them.

Other special characters, such as Greek, can be searched on the Advanced search page by entering the names of the characters.

Some special characters which appear very infrequently are not displayed, but are represented by hollow diamond symbols. Move the mouse over the symbol to display the character code.

Hyphens

A Find Word search ignores hyphens and does not distinguish hyphens and spaces. This means that typing database will find database, data-base, or data base.

In a Full Text search, however, typing data-base will find both data-base and data base, but to find database you have to type it in exactly, i.e. as one word.

Case

In a Find Word or Full Text search you can use upper or lower case letters to type your search term. For example, dickens will find Dickens and dickens.

An option to do case-sensitive searches is available on the Advanced search page.