"ISM" causing a wildcard affect when text searching

Question

When I perform a text search in jira for the word "ageism" it returns results that include the word "age" in their description and/or summary.

When I perform this same search with something like "ageish" it does not return the results that have "age" in their description and/or summary.

What makes ISM at the end of word act like a wildcard or "*"?

Are there other three letter combos that act like a wildcard or "*"?

How do you turn it off? (Putting the search word in quotes has no affect.)

Bill Sheboy · Answer

You may want to work with your Jira Site Admin to check with the Atlassian Support team to learn what they suggest: https://support.atlassian.com/contact/#/

Michael Goldberg · Answer

@Bill Sheboy Thank you for the reply.  The link you provided led me to this section about stemming:

* Your Jira administrator can disable word stemming (so that Jira will find issues based on exact matches with words) by changing the Indexing Language to Other (under Administration > System > General Configuration).
* Word stemming applies to all Jira fields (as well as text fields).
* When Jira indexes its fields, any words that are 'stemmed' are stored in Jira's search index in root form only.

Unfortunately changing this setting did not fix the issue.

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @Michael Goldberg

What you describe seems to be an overlap between the "fuzzy" and "prefix and suffix" searches with the JQL CONTAINS ~ operator: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwareserver/search-syntax-for-text-fields-939938747.html#Searchsyntaxfortextfields-fuzzyFuzzysearches:~

I have not found specific documentation on the terms used for JQL fuzzy search versus when prefix / suffix applies.  Guessing a bit, perhaps because "ism" is less colloquial than "ish" suffixes it is included in the fuzzy-parsing.

Kind regards,
Bill