"Truncate" means to shorten or cut off. Use a truncation symbol in your search to retrieve all variations of a word stem. Adding the truncation symbol ? in a Hawaii Voyager keyword search after a word stem collects all records that have those words in them:

• crim?: crime, crimes, criminal, criminals, criminology
• teen?: teens, teenager, teenagers
• surf?: surf, surfer, surfers, surfboard, surfboarders, surfboarding, etc.

Use a "wild-card" symbol within a word to retrieve all variants of the word. For example:

• wom*n : women, woman
• analys*s : analysis, analyses
• labo*r : labor, labour
  

Common truncation and wild-card symbols include ?, *, $, #. Symbols used vary by search engine. Check out the online help for the database to see which one you should use.