Yes, and no.


You can use shading instead of highlighting. That is permanent formatting.
Instead of just find, use the Replace feature (Ctrl+H).

Put the word or phrase being found in the find box and the same word in the Replace With box but click on the More button and then Formatting > Borders and Shading. Pick a shading color. Replace All.

Do the same with other find targets. If you want to clean this up you can try to find that shade (with no text) and replace with no shade and no text.

Thanks Charles!

Looks like there is a "highlight" option in the more/format section, so that seems to work by adding the highlight.

Should be easy to remove them all at the end with a simple Cntrl-A and selecting no highlight.

You are correct. The Highlight selection does not let you choose the color, it will be whatever Word has selected for highlighting on the Home tab at the time.

This means you can choose different colors for different terms if you want, but are limited to the choices available for ordinary highlighting. The default color is yellow.