Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
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Domesticated wild card

Search engine operator defines part of speech to look for
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Say I'm going to write an article about inventors and want to do some background research to see how others have described them, what studies show about them, etc. I go to an Internet search engine like Google and type "Inventors ~are *" The ~ in front of the "are" will give me synonyms for the word "are." The wild card of "*" will give me ALL parts of speech following the phrase "inventors are." But I only want adjectives like fat, stupid, lazy, hot, etc. I don't want prepositions, conjunctions, or pronouns. I want to be able to hunt for adjectives only with a search like "inventors are *adjective" where *adjective better defines the wild card I seek. I could also search for *noun, *verb and so on. The search engine would have to look to a list of words for various parts of speech such as (1). Edit 2013-08-24: the Asterisk could also be placed in the front of a number -- *number, or symbol -- *@ in order to search for these specific items.
Sunstone, Jul 31 2013

(1) List of adjectives http://www.esldesk....cabulary/adjectives
Parts of speech database a search engine would require for more specific wild card searches [Sunstone, Jul 31 2013]

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       Hmm. I didn't think much of your example, but on momentary reflection I think it would be very useful to be able to specify parts of speech in searches. Google should *verb this.
MaxwellBuchanan, Jul 31 2013
  

       But would it work as a mouse trap?
pashute, Jan 08 2014
  

       Oh. I thought this was going to have to do with my San Diego Chargers making it into the playoffs.
normzone, Jan 08 2014
  
      
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