Search Wa Dictionary Database
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