Wildcards

What is a wildcard?

A wildcard is a character which stands for any letter. You can include wildcards in a Find Word or Full Text search to make your search more flexible.

There are two wildcards available in the OED:

• The question mark ? represents the occurrence of any one single character

• The asterisk * represents the occurrence of any number of characters (or no character at all)

A search with a wildcard retrieves all results which contain matching terms. For example

• c?t finds cat, cot, cut

• c*t finds cat, caught, commencement, conflict, consent, cot, cut, etc.

How can wildcards help me in a search?

Wildcards are useful if you do not know how to spell a word, if you are not sure in what form the term you want appears in the dictionary, or if you want to find several terms beginning with the same root.

• The search term *sychok?n?s?s finds psychokinesis

• The term colo*r matches color and colour

• The term chorograph* finds chorographer, chorographic, chorographical, chorographically

Character classes

As well as being able to match any single character (with ?), and any string of characters (with *), it is possible to match any of a specified set of characters or strings, using the expressions described below.

A set of characters enclosed in square brackets ([]) represents a single character which can be any one of the bracketed characters. For example

• s[pt]eak will find speak and steak.

A hyphen can be used to abbreviate a range of characters in a square-bracketed expression. For example, [l-p] means the same as [lmnop]

• s[l-p]eak will find sleak, smeak, sneak, and speak (but not steak).

A caret (^) can be used at the start of a square-bracketed expression, to indicate that the character represented by the expression is not to be any of those included in the brackets.

• s[^p]eak will find sneak, steak, etc., but not speak.

A set of strings (separated by commas) enclosed in braces ({}) represents a string which can be any one of the bracketed strings. For example

• walk{s,ed,ing} will find walks, walked, and walking.