The most effective method of finding a word on MilTerms is to peform a search. However, a few options exist to help refine a visitors' search and return only the most accurate and relevant results. You will notice that a clickable pull-down menu exists immediately to the left of the search field. Within this pull-down menu you will find "Exact Term:", "Begins With:", "Wildcard", and "Reverse Lookup". A description of these search options may be found below.

Exact Term:
This is the default setting for the pull-down menu, and will appear as the search method whenever a page is loaded on MilTerms.com. "Exact Term" simply means that the system will only return results that match your search word(s) exactly. For instance, if you searched for the term "AAA", MilTerms.com would only return words that matched this term exactly. In other words, terms such as "BAAA" or "AAADS" would not appear, because they contain extra letters beyond your search term.

Begins With:
If you know the first few letters of a word or phrase, you might consider using this option. "Begins With" is designed to return any matching results from our system that contain your search term(s) at the beginning of the entry. For instance, if you searched for "tank", an entry such as "tank landing ship" would appear in the list of results. However, an entry such as "amphibious tank" would not appear, because the beginning of this entry does not contain the term "tank".

Wildcard:
This is a very popular method of search, and often returns the most results. "Wildcard" is designed to display any entry that contains the search term, regardless of its position within the word. For instance, if you searched for the term "AR", the system would return a variety of results such as "BAR", "Army", and "Submarine", as well as "AR" itself. You should notice that each of these terms contain the two letters "AR" at some point in the words (ARmy, SubmARine, BAR). The "Wildcard" search is designed to return the maximum number of results for a given search term. Try to be as specific as possible when using "Wildcard" in order to narrow your results.

Reverse Lookup:
Instead of searching for a portion of the actual word or phrase, "Reverse Lookup" allows visitors to find specific terms in the definitions of the words in our system. For instance, if you know that a word or phrase contains the word "rank" somewhere within its definition, you may perform a "Reverse Lookup" to list all terms in the dictionary that contain "rank" in its definition.