More precisely, you type a string of many words, using single spaces to separate them, and the string is found even if there are multiple spaces, newlines or other punctuation between the words. Word search is useful in editing documents formatted by text formatters. If you edit while looking at the printed, formatted version, you can't tell where the line breaks are in the source file. Word search, allows you to search without having to know the line breaks. RET Search backward for words , ignoring differences in punctuation.
Word search is a special case of non-incremental search.
Being non-incremental, this search does not start until the argument is terminated. It works by constructing a regular expression and searching for that. See section Regular Expression Search . You can bind these commands to keys. Go to the previous , next section.