Wildcards are used to represent one or more characters in a word. This is useful when you would like to retrieve all documents containing variations of a word or when you are not sure of the characters contained by the word through which you will search. Wildcards can be used in either full-text or field searches.
| Wildcard | Description |
| * | (asterisk) Represents any number of missing characters (including zero). For example, govern*s would find "governors", "governments", and "governs". |
| ? | (question mark) Represents any single character. For example, gr?y would find "gray" and "grey", but not "gravy". |
| [] | (brackets) Brackets are also used as a wildcard for any single character. A limited set of replacement characters can be specified within the brackets. For example, gr[ae]y would find "gray" and "grey", but no others. |
| - | (dash) This operator indicates a range of characters. For example, b[a-i]t would find the words "bat", "bet" and "bit", but not "but". |
Wildcards may be combined. For example, br[a-o]ke* would find all of the following words: brake, braked, broke, broker, and broken.