When writing, even the most expert makes mistakes. Both in writing and in style. On many occasions the same program corrects them, but sometimes you have to help it, as is the case of finding all the repeated words in a Word document .
When you review your document, no matter how many times you read it, you may not notice all the errors that are in it. Similarly, the automatic corrector is not always as effective as it is thought. Don’t worry, Word has the necessary tools to correct your text and leave it without a single error. You just have to learn how to use it to get the most out of it.
How to Find All Repeated Words in a Word Document
It is necessary to know how many versions of Windows 10 there are, to determine if you have the most recent and therefore the most current edition of Word.
Index( )
- What is called the repetition of words in a text
- Find all repeated words in a Word document
- Word wildcards
- How to easily check repeated words in Word
- Find repeating paragraphs in Word
- Repeated words in a Word document and wildcards
- How to underline all the same words in Word
- How to delete the same words in Word
- How to find all the repeated words in a Word document using wildcards?
What is called the repetition of words in a text
There is no specific term for this problem, but we could use ‘redundancy’ or ‘catchphrase’. Redundancy refers to the tendency to extend an argument too long and is something that should be avoided in certain cases. On the other hand, the catchphrase is the use of phrases in a repetitive way.
Although the catchphrase is seen mainly in speeches, it can also sneak into our texts, if we tend to use a word too much. Redundancy serves a purpose if you want to express a complex message in an explainable way, but you have to be careful and the catchphrase should also be avoided at all costs .
Find all repeated words in a Word document
One of the most common mistakes when writing a document is that sometimes repeated words can be written. Normally, Word’s auto-checker alerts you to this error by underlining repetition in red. But this is not infallible, if you have the correction tool disabled it is still possible to detect these errors very easily. Using the program’s wildcards.
Word wildcards
Wildcards in Word are quite useful tools when navigating and correcting a document. However, many users do not know how to use them and many more do not even know that they exist. To find all the repeated words in a Word document, you can make use of these wildcards and even lock the position of an image in Word.
How to easily check repeated words in Word
Without a doubt, the easiest way to find repeated words in a Word document is by using the underline tool. With this tool you can check the integrity of your text looking for words that you think you repeated a lot. We will show you this below.
Find repeating paragraphs in Word
You may have gotten confused and copied a paragraph into large text. Fortunately, you can find repeating paragraphs if you use the underline tool below. It is enough that, instead of writing a word, you paste the text that is repeated in the document .
Repeated words in a Word document and wildcards
To get a repeated word, the first thing to do is search for a word, right? For this we will use the Word tool ” Search “. This is in the ” Start ” section of the top menu. It should be noted that to use this type of search you must select the “Use wildcard characters” box in the Search and Replace window.
If a word is a sequence of letters arranged in a specific way. So the first wildcard to use would be [a-zA-Z]. In this way the search engine will consider all the letters of the alphabet taking into account upper and lower case. Similarly, within this sequence will be the vowels with their accents and the letter “ñ”.
With that joker you can already get a letter. Now, how to find a word? Well, to do that you must use this wildcard [aaZ] {1;}. This is translated as a redundant letter one or more times, counting capital letters, accents, and the letter ñ.
The <> characters placed at the beginning and end of the wildcard will indicate the beginning and end of each word. But since you want to search for repeated words, you will modify the wildcard to the following <[a-zA-Z] {1;}). By replacing the “greater than” characters with a parenthesis, you are saying that you want to search for words followed by a space.
How to underline all the same words in Word
Underlining words is simple, for this we must use the ‘Find and replace’ tool. This option is found in the ‘Home’ section with the name of ‘Replace’, in turn, you can press Ctrl + B to display the tool.
Make sure you are in the ‘Search’ tab and type the word you want to search for. At the top you will see the option ‘Highlight reading’ , There select ‘Highlight all’. Doing the above will highlight the word in the text so you can see all the times it is there.
How to delete the same words in Word
To eliminate the repeated words, we must also use the ‘Find and replace’ tool . Remember, you access it through ‘Start’, there click on ‘Replace’. The tool menu will be displayed, you must click on the ‘Replace’ tab.
In ‘Search’ write the term you want to remove from your text and leave the ‘Replace with’ section blank. You can do the process one by one, clicking on ‘Find next’ to see the word in each section of the text, to make the modification click on ‘Replace’. If you want to remove all the words , click on ‘Replace all’.
How to find all the repeated words in a Word document using wildcards?
As an extra point, you should know that wildcards also apply to other cases, such as inserting a YouTube video in a Word document , a useful tool to finalize the file together with the elimination of repeated words.
Now, if the previous wildcard only searches for words followed by a space , how to find all the repeated words in a Word document? For that case, the wildcard explained above would be modified to the following (<[a-zA-Z] {1;}) \ 1>.
If you can tell, the previous wildcard is now inside parentheses. In wildcard theory it says that parentheses are used to create search references. Therefore adding parentheses created a reference.
This is followed by a space and then \ 1 follows. This refers to the word to search for. That is, to the first group of parentheses. If there were more sets of characters the reference would be \ 2, \ 3, or the amount of group of parentheses that are.
And finally this character> refers to the end of the word. So if you use this wildcard, it will find the redundancy “his his” but not “his dream” . Finally, after finding all the repeated words in a Word document, you will want to delete all the repeated words.
Thus, in the Word search and replace window you must put the following wildcard in the search bar (<[a-zA-Z] {1;}) \ 1> and in the replace window you must put \ 1. In this way, the repeated word will be deleted automatically.
