In ABBYY Lingvo, you can search for a word not only in the word list, but also in other parts of the entries - in translations, examples or comments.
You can also use the wildcard characters * and ? when performing searches (note, however, that wildcard search will only search in the word list, not in the entire text of the dictionaries). Wildcard searches are useful when you do not know the exact spelling of a word or if you wish to find all the words with a particular ending, beginning or root.
Below you will find practical examples for each type of search.
In ABBYY Lingvo, you can search for a word or phrase in the
entire text of the dictionaries, i.e. in the headwords,
translations, examples, and comments. To perform a full-text
search, type the text to search in the search field and click
.
Note: You may wish to adjust the full-text
search options in
Tools>Options…>Search.
You can also set up ABBYY Lingvo to perform a full-text search
automatically whenever you click 
or press
Enter and there are no matches for your search term in the
word list (i.e. when there are no entry headwords corresponding to
your query). To enable this feature, select the option
Automatically search for words not found in the word list in
Tools>Options…>Search. Please note that this auto
search feature has been pre-configured for optimal performance and
its settings cannot be changed. The following factory settings are
used for auto searches:
Note: The search options you select in
Tools>Options…>Search do not affect auto search.
Consequently, the number of search results for the same search term
may differ depending on whether the results have been obtained by
running a full-text search manually or whether ABBYY Lingvo has
initiated an auto search.
|
Example
Type
nice thing in the search field and click
or press
Ctrl+F. The Search Results dialog box will open,
displaying the sections of the entries where your search term has
been found.
To try out the auto search feature, make sure Automatically
search for words not found in the word list is selected in
Tools>Options…>Search and click
|
You can use wildcard searches to find words with the same endings, roots, etc. This type of search is also helpful when you are not sure how to spell a word. Simple type ? in place of each one unknown letter or * in place of one or more unknown letters.
Note: The * character stands for any string of
characters, including spaces. For this reason, a wildcard search
involving this character may return not only separate words but
also word combinations.
See also:
