Truncation is the use of a wild card character or symbol to stand for alternate endings attached to a stem word. Truncation is especially useful for retrieving both the singular and plural forms of most words.
Almost all databases support truncation, but they vary in terms of which character is the wild card. The two most common are ? and *, but database help screens always tell you. Whichever character is used by a database, they work the same way.
