How to: Edit a Thesaurus File
New: 5 December 2005
The thesaurus files are empty. You must add synonyms for query terms to these files before Full-Text Search queries that look for synonyms can work properly. For more information about modifying a thesaurus file, see Configuring Thesaurus Files.
Important
Entries added to the thesaurus cannot be made up entirely of special characters. Also, thesaurus entries should not be empty and should not be noise words.
Editing a thesaurus file
Open the thesaurus file you want to edit in Microsoft Notepad.
Note
If you add double-byte character set (DBCS) characters to the file, you must save the files in Unicode.
If you are editing the thesaurus file for the first time, remove the following comment lines at the beginning and end of the file, respectively:
<!--Commented out -->Add, modify, or delete a replacement set, or expansion set. For more information, see Configuring Thesaurus Files
Save the file and close Notepad.
Restart the MSFTESQL service.
Note
If the MSFTESQL service is not restarted, the changes made to the thesaurus files are not picked up.
See Also
Concepts
Other Resources
CONTAINS (Transact-SQL)
FREETEXT (Transact-SQL)
FREETEXTTABLE (Transact-SQL)