REonline - allRE Help

allRE is indexed by a whole range of terms which can be found in the thesaurus.

You can choose to search for any or all the words you type in, by selecting the appropriate button.
Some terms used in RE have a variety of spellings in use: allRE contains lists of these, and all recognised spelling variations will be searched for. Where possible, the results display will give priority to the one you entered.
Searching for whole words (the default) is the recommended way to use allRE and usually gives the most accurate results. But for a broader search, you can select 'starts of words' instead of 'whole words'. (Stem searching.)
If you select the 'process keywords through thesaurus' option, other appropriate settings will switch automatically (i.e. whole words, normal search). As well as searching the database, the thesaurus will be searched separately, to match whatever words you have entered against thesaurus terms. All the terms found will be listed, along with any alternatives / variant spellings, before the normal results are displayed.

Phrases will be checked against the thesaurus using the words in the order in which they have been entered.

If no terms are listed, then none were matched and the search reverted to a normal keyword search.
Note that the thesaurus can only be selected for 'normal' searching. If you choose the 'sound' or 'artefact' searches, a normal literal search is carried out, on a special separate index (of sound or artefact terms).