What is a 'wildcard' search?

Read Search Tips for a fuller explanation of the search possibilities on our site.

In software, a wildcard character is a single character, in our case it is an asterisk (*), used to represent a number of characters or an empty string. It is often used in file searches so the full name need not be typed.

Thus a search on 'Man*' would find 'Manchester', 'Mansfield', 'Mancunian', 'Manly' etc

The ? can be used as a wildcard, and could mean any appropriate character. Thus a search on 'b?g' would find 'bag','beg', 'big', 'bog', 'bug'