In order to take advantage of stemming in your search application, the meta.stem-expand option on your Project's Metasearch tab must be set to true, and stemming logic must be active in that project. To verify the latter, select the Components tab for your search application project, and select the form used for standard query input (the Input Form (simple) setting). Scroll down until you see the Input Element "query" setting, and click edit to see its current values. Scroll down and verify that the Logic: stem value is checked, and check it if it is not. Click OK to save your changes.
In order to use the stemming and wildcard dictionaries from a custom dictionary in your search application, you must set the Dictionary option on the Advanced > Metasearch > Query Modification tab for the project that defines your search application to the full pathname of the dictionary. If the meta.stem-expand option is set to true and stemming logic is enabled in your application, stem expansion will look for a stemming dictionary whose name is created by concatenating the name of your dictionary, a period ('.') and the value of the meta.stem-expand-stemmer variable, which identifies the stemmers to use. For example, if your dictionary file was mydict.dict and your current meta.stem-expand-stemmer variable was set to delanguage+english+depluralize, activating a stem expansion would look for the file mydict.dict.delanguage+english+depluralize as the name of the file containing a list of stems.
After enabling stemming logic (or verifying that it was already enabled), you can identify words in your input queries that you want to have stemmed by appending a dollar sign ('$') to them. For example, if you want to submit a stemmed query for the word painting, you could enter the query term painting$ to internally submit a query of the form paint OR paints OR painting.
To proceed to the next section, click Troubleshooting.