Help:Searching
The search box appears down the left hand side of every page. You can type in a single word you want help on or several words to search for.
You may want a quick answer to an immediate question, perhaps as a result of proof-reading an assignment, or a question about a particular word. Sometimes the article that might help you best would be about the prefix or suffix of the word, such as -ing.
The search box has two buttons:
- Click the Go button or press Enter to go directly to the article whose title matches what you've typed, if it exists. (If not, you'll get search results.)
- Click the Search button to search for all instances of the search terms you've typed. (For example, you may want to see all articles containing the word 'pronoun' rather than go straight to the 'pronoun' article; or indeed, the 'article' article.)
Search results show pages whose titles contain the search words, followed by pages whose text contains them.
What to search for
Pages are usually titled in the same way a dictionary would classify an article. For example, the page about nouns is 'noun', and 'malapropism' will tell you what one is.
Pages about several words (these usually clarify common confusions) can be reached by searching for any of the individual words. You'll find help on the difference between flaut and flout whether you search for 'flaut' or 'flout'.
Limitations
The search engine deliberately ignores common words that occur very frequently. These include short words and words like "have" or "from".
However, these short or common words are often precisely the ones that readers may be interested in! (There's a lot to be said about 'and' or 'its'.)
Because pages exist with precisely these titles, you can jump straight to them with the Go button. However, using the Search button will give no results.
More help
See Help:Contents.
