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The wildcard operator is one of the most powerful Boolean operators in your toolkit. At Fastcase, we use the asterisk symbol (*) as our wildcard.

When you put the asterisk after the stem of a word, your search will return documents containing any word beginning with that stem.

For example:

Termin* –> Search results containing the words termination, terminated, terminal, etc.

Litig* –> Search results containing the words litigator, litigation, litigious, etc.

Eat* –> Search results containing the words eat, eaten, eatery, eaters, eating

As you can see, using the wildcard operator is a very powerful and flexible tool. Think about incorporating the wildcard regularly in your searches.

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Tags: tips