Wildcard syntax¶

A wildcard query is a pattern for the whole headword. Choose wildcard in the drop-down next to the search box.

Wildcards¶

** is the same as *. Every other character matches only itself, [, ] and \ included.

The whole headword¶

A pattern matches from the first character of the headword to the last.

A pattern without * or ? finds only the headword it spells.

Case and accents¶

Case and accents do not exclude a headword. cafe, Cafe and café all find cafe, café, Café and CAFÉ. koln finds Köln, елка finds ёлка.

A capital letter or an accent in the pattern sets the order of the results (Result order):

• A capital letter puts the headwords with that case first: March lists March before march.
• An accent puts the headwords with that accent first: café* lists café and Café before cafe, and äh* lists Ähnlichkeit before ah.
• With both, case comes first: Café* lists Café, then café, then cafe.

A capital letter is an uppercase or titlecase letter in any script: M, É, Ж, Dž. An accent is a mark that a letter loses when accents are ignored: é, ü, ñ, ё, й.

ß, ł, ø and đ are letters of their own, not accented letters: strasse does not find Straße.

Examples¶

What is searched¶

• Headwords of indexed dictionaries. A dictionary gets its headword index in the background on its first search. Until then, wildcard search does not search it, and its result section offers to add the headword index.
• The headword an entry is filed under. Other spellings that the dictionary lists for the same entry are not matched; exact and prefix search find them.
• Not the article text: use full-text search.

A query that contains * or ? is not lemmatized. A query without them is lemmatized as in the other modes (Inflected words).

A followed link, a double-clicked word and a word from another app are looked up in prefix mode, not as a pattern.

Result order¶

1. The headword the pattern spells, exactly as typed. A pattern spells a headword when it has no ?: the pattern with every * matching nothing. nacion* spells nacion, un*able spells unable.
2. The other results, by case and accents (Case and accents).
3. Within the same case and accents: the headword the pattern spells, then the others in alphabetical order, as in a printed dictionary:
   • Letters count first, without accents and case: kohlen, Kohler, Köhler.
   • Between headwords that are otherwise the same, the one without an accent comes first: Kohler before Köhler.
   • Then lowercase before capital: über before Über.

This is the order of DIN 5007-1 and of the Duden, and of the Unicode Collation Algorithm. ß sorts as a letter after z, not as ss.

Browse A–Z… uses a different order: case is ignored, and a headword that starts with an accented or non-Latin letter comes after Z.

The number of results per dictionary is the same as in the other modes (Result order).

Limits¶

• A pattern has at most 64 characters.
• There are no character sets ([aeiou]), alternatives or repeat counts. Write ??? for exactly three characters.
• * and ? cannot be searched as themselves. To find a headword with one of them, use exact or prefix.
• A pattern that starts with * or ? reads every headword of every searched dictionary, so it is slower on a large library.

In a link, the API and the terminal¶

In a link and in the API, write ? as %3F:

http://localhost:6888/?q=b%3F%3F%3Fd&mode=wildcard&dict=all

In a terminal, put the pattern in single quotes, so that the shell does not expand * and ?:

wudict wildcard ~/.wudict/db/Oxford 'b???d'
wudict searchall -mode wildcard '*ology'