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Wildcards and truncation

Discover how to use wildcard and truncation symbols to expand or focus WorldCat index searches.

Use wildcard and truncation symbols to expand or focus searches. The system retrieves up to 300 matches to search terms when you use wildcards or truncation.

 Note: For non-Latin script search terms, truncation can be used for Bengali, CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean), Devanagari, Tamil, and Thai scripts only. For other supported non-Latin scripts, use browsing for automatic truncation.

Name Symbol Function Usage Example
Number sign # Wildcard
  • A minimum of three characters must precede the symbol.
  • Replace one character in a search.
wom#n retrieves woman and women
Question mark ? Wildcard
  • A minimum of three characters should precede the symbol.
     Caution: When less than three characters precede the symbol, the results returned may be incomplete.
  • Replace 0 to 9 unknown characters in a search term.
  • Followed by a number, replace the specified number of unknown characters (?n — question mark followed by a number from 1 to 9).

encyclop?dia retrieves 
encyclopedia and encyclopaedia

res?4tion retrieves respiration, restoration, reservation, etc.

Asterisk * Truncation
  • A minimum of three characters must precede the symbol.
  • Add to the end of a word to retrieve variant endings.
  • Search returns records with 0 or more characters in place of the truncation symbol.
connect* retrieves connectconnectionconnectivity, etc.