Word Wildcards: A Complete Guide for Editors
If you’re involved in editing long documents, you will likely recognize this scenario. You open a draft and find the same small problem repeated hundreds of times. The dates are half short-form and half long, some prefixes are hyphenated and some aren’t, and a.m. has somehow become A.M. and occasionally am. You fix three, then realise there are hundreds more where those came from. Ordinary Find and Replace can’t help much, because you aren’t looking for individual words so much as a pattern. There must be an easier way, surely, than hunting these all down manually. Well, yes. That’s what Word wildcards are for.
What are wildcards in Word
Wildcards in Word are symbols you use in a search to match a pattern rather than an exact phrase. Instead of searching for cat, you can search for any three-letter word beginning with c, any two-digit number, or a date written in a particular format. Combine wildcard characters and you can find a whole family of text patterns in one pass.
Wildcards are among the most powerful, and least-used, tools in your editor’s toolkit. The reason more people don’t use them is usually fear, not difficulty. They look a bit mathsy, like something a programmer would enjoy and you, a wordsy person, wouldn’t. In fact, the opposite is true: people who work with language all day are exactly the people best placed to spot the patterns that make a wildcard search worth writing.
How to turn on wildcards in Word
Wildcards are off by default, and the sidebar search you open with Ctrl+F won’t help. Try this instead:
Press Ctrl+H to open the full Find and Replace window.
Click More in the bottom-left corner.
Tick Use wildcards.
Then two things happen immediately, and both matter.
Match case greys out because wildcard searches are case-sensitive. The string ?at treats cat and Cat as different things.
Find whole words only greys out too, because wildcard searches ignore word boundaries unless you tell them not to. Nearly every “why on earth did it find that?” moment traces back to one of those two facts.
Once wildcards are on, you can click Less to hide the options and move between the Find and Find and Replace tabs without switching them off. Just remember to untick Use wildcards when you want an ordinary search again.
The Word wildcard characters
Here’s a quick reference to the main Word wildcard characters. In the examples, angle brackets mark word boundaries and are part of the search pattern.
| Symbol | What it finds | Example |
|---|---|---|
? |
Exactly one character | s?t finds sat, set, and sit. |
* |
Zero or more characters | be*st finds best, bedpost, and beauty therapist. |
< > |
The beginning or end of a word | <s?t> finds three-letter words such as sat, set, and sit. |
[ ] |
One character from a list or range | <b[ae]t> finds bat and bet. [0-9] matches one digit. |
{n}, {n,}, {n,m} |
A set number, minimum, or range of repetitions | <[0-9]{3}> finds 100, 458, and 911. |
@ |
One or more of the previous character or expression | <[0-9]@> finds 9, 61, and 8064. |
[! ] |
One character except those listed or in the range | <[!a-m]at> finds oat, pat, and rat. |
\ |
The next wildcard character is literal | \? finds a question mark. |
? means exactly one of any character
The string s?t finds sat, set, sit, sot, and s3t if they appear in your text. “Anything” really does mean any character, so a question mark can match a space or punctuation too. Don’t assume it will cross a paragraph break; Word treats paragraph marks as special characters in wildcard searches.
* means zero or more of anything
The asterisk can stand for one character, many characters, or nothing at all. In be*st, it fills the gap in best and bedpost. Because spaces count too, it can also reach from be at the start of beauty to st at the end of therapist, matching beauty therapist. That’s a lot of freedom for one little star. Keep the rest of the pattern tight, and don’t rely on * to cross paragraph breaks.
< and > mark word boundaries
These are the symbols that make broad searches behave. The pattern s?t can find sit inside situate and set inside marmoset. Add boundaries and <s?t> finds only three-letter words that start with s and end with t. Word treats hyphens and dashes as boundaries too, so know-it-all contains three words for wildcard purposes. Adding boundaries when you need a whole word is usually a good idea.
[ ] gives you a choice of characters
Square brackets are the bread and butter of wildcard searching. The pattern <b[ae]t> finds bat and bet, and nothing else. You can use ranges such as [0-9] or [A-Z], and combine ranges in one set.
Keep the contents as tight as possible. To catch the dotted forms a.m., A.M., p.m., and P.M., use [AaPp].[Mm]. A broader pattern such as [A-z].[A-z]. can also catch punctuation, because the range from uppercase Z to lowercase a includes other characters. A-z looks like a shortcut for “any letter,” but it isn’t.
{ } tells Word how many times to repeat something
The pattern <[0-9]{3}> finds a three-digit number, which is tidier than typing <[0-9][0-9][0-9]>. The pattern <[0-9]{2,3}> finds two- or three-digit numbers. Leave one end of the range open to mean “this many or more”: <[0-9]{4,}> finds numbers with at least four digits, such as 1901 or 90125. Check the context before replacing; a four-digit number might be a year, a code, or part of something else.
@ means one or more of the previous thing
This may sound identical to {1,}, and for most purposes it is. Use <[0-9]@> when you want one or more digits without setting an upper limit. It’s a neat, shorter way to write the pattern. If you’re combining repetitions with other parts of a search, test the whole string; the match you get depends on the pattern around it too.
! means not these characters
Put an exclamation mark just inside square brackets to exclude characters. The pattern <[!a-m]at> finds words such as oat, pat, rat, and sat: the first character can be anything except a through m. It still has to find a character, though. This isn’t a way to match nothing.
\ escapes a wildcard
What if you want to find a real question mark or a genuine square bracket? Put a backslash in front of the wildcard character and it loses its special powers. The pattern \? finds a question mark. And \[[0-9]@\] finds any number inside square brackets: [1], [15], [50]. Here the backslashes make the square brackets literal, while [0-9]@ still does its wildcard job.
How to test a wildcard search safely
A scratch file is useful when you’re learning, and it’s a good place to try out a new pattern. Paste in representative text and see what happens before you take a search to a live file. But a large test file on a different subject can’t tell you whether the pattern will catch a name, abbreviation, or technical term in the text you’re editing. Test against a copy of the actual material, including the exceptions you expect to find.
And always run Find before Replace All. Always.
Reusing your wildcards in PerfectIt
Once you’ve built a string that works, it seems a waste to type it out again next month. PerfectIt’s Wildcard Find & Replace check lets you save wildcard searches in a style sheet, so you can run the same checks on future documents. Each hit is shown in context before you decide whether to fix it.
Frequently asked questions
Are Word wildcards case-sensitive
Yes, always. When Use wildcards is on, Match case is unavailable because the search pattern determines the capitalization. [Cc]at finds both Cat and cat.
Are Word wildcards the same as regular expressions
Sort of. They do broadly the same job, but Word uses its own set of symbols. Some look confusingly similar to regular-expression symbols, but their functions have been shuffled around. Knowing regex helps you understand the idea, but not which symbol does what in Word.
Why is my wildcard search finding text across two words
Because ? and * can match spaces, and Word wildcard searches don’t automatically stop at word boundaries. Add < and > when you want to restrict a pattern to a whole word. Paragraph marks need special handling.
Can I use wildcards in the Replace field
Not the same ones. Use wildcards in the Find field. To rearrange what you find, group parts of the pattern with parentheses and use numbered references such as \1 and \2 in the Replace field.
Get the full guide for free
These small but mighty symbols can change how you approach a messy manuscript. The real power comes from combining them and knowing what to do when a string misbehaves.
Brave New Word is our free ebook on wildcard Find and Replace in Word and PerfectIt. It covers the complete symbol set, the replace function and backreferences, dozens of worked examples for medical, legal, technical, proposal, and academic writing, troubleshooting for when a string goes wrong, and two chapters on building wildcard checks into PerfectIt. Plus, there’s a printable cheat sheet at the back.