What is Truncation and How Does it Work?

Truncation is a search technique used in databases that replaces the ending of a word with a symbol. Learn more about how it works with examples.

What is Truncation and How Does it Work?

Truncation is a search technique used in databases that replaces the ending of a word with a symbol. It is also known as wildcard search and allows you to search for a term and its spelling variants. To truncate a search term, you need to do a keyword search in a database, but remove the end of the word and add an asterisk (*) to the end of the word. Truncation is very useful when you know that one of your search terms has multiple endings, but all variations represent basically the same idea.

It is a symbol added to the end of the root of a word to tell the database to search for all forms of a word. Using truncation will help you complete your search faster, as you won't have to manually type and search every variation of the word. For example, if you want to search for words related to run, you can use truncation by typing run*. This will return results such as running, runner, runs, ran, etc. You can also use truncation with multiple words, such as run* jump*.

This will return results such as running jumps, jumping runs, etc. Truncation is an effective way to quickly find relevant information in databases. It can save time and effort by allowing you to search for multiple variations of a word at once. However, it is important to remember that truncation can also return irrelevant results, so it is important to review the results carefully before making any decisions.

Charlotte Wilson
Charlotte Wilson

Friendly travel advocate. Freelance zombie scholar. Extreme web practitioner. Evil coffee buff. Professional beer practitioner.

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