American Folklore Society Ethnographic Thesaurus

Basic Searching

You may search based on any number of single terms, or a phrase surrounded by double quotes.

Advanced Searching

wildcard searches

To perform a single character wildcard search, use the "?" symbol. To perform a multiple character wildcard search use the "*" symbol. Wildcard searches for the first character are not currently supported.

fuzzy searches

To perform a fuzzy search, append the tilde, "~" symbol to a search term. For instance, "roam~" will find records with the term "roam" but also records with terms like "road" or even "rom".

proximity search

To locate two terms that appear within a certain distance of each other, you may put the terms in quotes followed by a tilde "~" symbol and then number of terms that may appear between them. For example, "egg spoon" will only return records that contain that exact phrase, but "egg spoon"~3 will also include things like "egg and spoon race".

boolean searches

To perform searches using the boolean AND, OR and NOT operators, simply include those terms in upper case. You may group operators using parentheses as in "(squash OR tennis) NOT vegetables".