Search Tips

Upper or lower case?

A list of abbreviations used in the Chambers Online Search can be found in the table on the right hand side of this page.

Upper or lower case?

Searches are case-insensitive, so it doesn’t matter whether you use upper case or lower case in the search box. For example, if you search for aid, you will get two results: the entries for aid and AID. Likewise, if you search for AID, you will get these two results as well.

Wildcards

A wildcard is a special character you can use to replace one or more characters in a word.

There are two types of wildcard. The first is a question mark ?, which matches a single character. The second is an asterisk *, which matches zero or more characters. The two kinds of wildcard can be mixed in a single search.

Some examples using wildcards

Question mark

tri?l finds trial and trill
d??s? finds daisy, deism, dense, etc…

Asterisk

fan* finds fan, Fanagalo, fanatic, fanatical, fanned, fanning, etc…

Mixed

it?n* finds itinerant, itinerantly, itineraries, itinerary

Searching Chambers Biographical Dictionary

You can search the Chambers Biographical Dictionary by name – either first or last name or a combination of the two. If you get more than one result click on the relevant name to see the full entry.

You can also move between entries by clicking on any names which appear in the text in blue.