 You're doing a research project, let's say, on farming, but you also want to find sources on farmers and farms. You could do separate searches for each term, or you could use the Boolean operator OR and type in farming or farmers or farms. But that's inefficient. There's a better way to capture all the variations in the word without typing them all in. That's truncation, a tool to make searching more efficient. Truncation is the use of a symbol to find variants of a word in your searches. Let's try this in Omni, the search tool on the library home page. If I search for urban asterisk, in my results I get urban, urbanization, and other words that have urban as the root word. Truncation is also good for searching singular and plural forms at the same time, or finding terms with variant spellings. Put the truncation symbol after the root, where the spellings begin to vary. You need to be careful with truncation, though. You could end up with lots of variations you don't want to expect. For example, if you're looking for Canada or Canadian, you can type in can add asterisk and get good results. But if you type in can asterisk, you will also find lots of sources with words like cancer, candidate, and cannabis. For truncation to work well, the root word you use needs to be distinct enough to give you useful results. While the truncation symbol for Omni and most of our popular databases is an asterisk sign, truncation symbols are not standardized and can vary from database to database. Common symbols include a question mark and dollar sign. Check the database help file to see which symbol is used in your database. If you have any questions, ask us at library.wlu.ca slash help slash ask us.