Hi Robert, thanks for replying.

This didn't seem to work for me, though. When I ran it as "Find in Main Document" it hung/crashed Word, so I tried it as a 'Find Next' wildcard search and it found whole paragraphs (multiples words including spaces), with each subsequent 'Find Next' selecting the same text with one character fewer than before.

Most of the info I've found on wildcard syntax is a bit vague about how to include whitespace as part of the criteria, which I'm guessing is needed to identify whole words.