Enter a word or phrase to search for in dictionary:

Wild cards permitted only in last search type above. Regular expressions permitted in first three search types above and in all full-text searches below. Whole-word search is also an option in searching Wa example/collocation fields and in Burmese and English definitions and example translations below. See more information under search hints at bottom of page.

Search hints:

• For Wa headword searches, indicate which orthography you are using for the search by clicking on the corresponding radio button. The entries found will be displayed in the order of the orthography you select. (You can convert from one orthography to another here.)
• Search types

  "Exact match (enhanced)" search

  An "Exact match (enhanced)" search of Wa headword entries will ignore upper and lower case differences and find capitalised proper nouns as well as ordinary uncapitalised words. "Enhanced" means that it will also find words enclosed within parentheses, usually alternate spellings. In a few cases this results in more matches than you might expect!

  "Starts with" search

  The "Starts with" search type will find all Wa headword entries which start with the search item, which can be a word or any string of letters.

  "Whole words" search

  The "Whole words" search type will find all Wa headword entries or parts of entries which are bounded by spaces or punctuation, i.e., whole syllables. A search for "mī" will match all entries containing "mī", but not those containing "mīang", "mīe", etc. Whole-word search is also available for searches in the Wa example/collocation fields and Burmese and English definition and example translation fields. For example, whole-word search is useful to find English "rain" without finding "grain", "strain", etc.

  "Anywhere" search

  The "Anywhere" search type will find the search item anywhere in a Wa headword entry. Thus, searching for "siam" with an "Anywhere" search would find "blix si mēi Siam," "ga ndēeng Siam," etc., in addition to the main entry "Siam."

  "Exact match, but ignore diacritics and case" search

  You can use the fifth search type, "Exact match, but ignore diacritics and case", to do an exact (not enhanced) search, but ignore the distinction between lower-case and upper-case letters, and also ignore breathy-mark macrons in the Chinese orthography. However, this option appears at times not to find all matching entries in the database. Our MySQL database handles the complex relationship of Unicode UTF-8 encoding, diacritics, wild card characters, and regular expressions in sometimes mysterious ways.

  "Exact match, with wild cards optional" search

  Using the sixth search type, "Exact match, with wild cards optional", you can make your search broader by using "wild cards". The underscore wild card "_" will match any single character. The per cent sign wild card "%" will match any number of characters, including zero characters. But a vowel+macron combination is for now treated as two characters. So, for example, a wild card search for "l_g" by typing "l_g" in the box above will find all "lag," "log," and "lug" entries; and a search for "l__g" will find "lāg," "lang," "liag," "līg," etc. You can search for all entries beginning with "lāi" by entering "lāi%". Or "l%hrom" will find all entries which start with "l" and end with "hrom". Searching for "p%" will retrieve all the entries in the database which start with "p".

• For the most sophisticated searches, use regular expressions. Regular expressions (often abbreviated as "regex") are like wild cards but use a more powerful and complicated syntax to achieve sophisticated searches. For example, you can "anchor" your search string to the beginning of a field with a "^" and to the end with a "$". Thus "^siam$" will only match the exact entire contents of a field.
• To search for a question mark (?) using regular expressions (this includes all searches other than Wa main word entry searches), precede it with two backslashes ( \\?), since the "?" character has a special meaning in regular expressions. Other characters with special meanings which must be preceded by two backslashes include: ^ + * $ . : | ( ) [ ] < > { }.

Abbreviations for Titles of Texts in Wa Corpus

Guide to Symbols and Abbreviations used in the Dictionary (PDF, 384KB)

Regular Expressions page from MySQL Manual

More Help with Regular Expressions

Information about downloading fonts needed for proper display (especially Burmese)

More help with typing IPA characters needed for Wa

Go to Main Interactive Tools Page