Fuzzy searching can be used to search for misspellings or variations of a word. To do so, use the FUZZY operator followed by a string in double quotes to find an approximate match for the string. For example, CONTAINS ( Products.Description, 'FUZZY "cotton"' ) returns cotton and misspellings such as coton or cotten.

Using the FUZZY operator is equivalent to breaking the string manually into substrings of length n and separating them with OR operators. For example, suppose you have a text index configured with the NGRAM term breaker and a MAXIMUM TERM LENGTH of 3. Specifying 'FUZZY "500 main street"' is equivalent to specifying '500 OR mai OR ain OR str OR tre OR ree OR eet'.

The FUZZY operator is useful in a full text search that returns a score. This is because many approximate matches may be returned, but usually only the matches with the highest scores are meaningful.