You can look up words in the dictionaries from the word lookup dialog. Enter a Japanese or English word in the Enter Expression text field. The search is performed as soon as you stop typing. The results will be displayed in the lower area of the dialog window. The part of the entry which matched the expression will be highlighted blue for each result line.

You can select the search mode from the Search Options part of the dialog. Exact matches will only return entries where the entered expression is identical to the word, reading or one of the translations of the entry. Starts with Expression and Ends with Expression will find entries where the word, reading or one of the translations have the search expression at the beginning/end. Any Match will return entries where the search expression appears anywhere within the result. Note that the dictionary formats may not support all of the search options. For example, the EDICT implementation does not do "ends with" searches for readings so you might not get all possible matches if you use this search mode.

You can limit the search to a single dictionary by selecting the Search Dictionary radio button and selecting the dictionary from the popup menu to the right. If the Search all Dictionaries radio button is selected, all dictionaries made available to JGloss in the preferences will be searched.

The options below Filter Results will limit the search results to dictionary entries which are marked with the selected attributes. Not all dictionary format support the attributes. The checkboxes will be disabled depending on the selected dictionary. Search Fields lets you limit the search to the word, readings or translation parts of the dictionary entries.

Field Match Mode controls if the the search option apply to a word in the field (e. g. translation) or the whole field. E. g. if you select Exact match and search for character, the translation Chinese character will only be found if the field match mode is Match words.