I would like to find ‘spirit’ by itself as a self-contained word and not part of ‘spiritual’.
The solution is as follows: Under ‘Edit’ choose ‘Find and Replace’ then type the specific word in the ‘Find’ box. Next select/activate: ‘Whole words only’ and choose from the options: ‘Find all’, ‘Find previous’ or ‘Find next’.
Good point. The simplest and obvious is frequently not seen when you focus your attention on a pre-adopted idea.
Use Edit>Find & Replace (CTRL+H) instead of Edit>Find (Ctrl+F) and enable Regular expressions. Your string must be bounded by “word boundary” markers \b.
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Thanks for your reply however it did not work. I still get ‘spirit’ in the word ‘spiritual’ highlighted when I only want the word ‘spirit’ to be highlighted when it stands alone by itself.
Have you checked the Regular expressions box? Did you forget the \b is the search key? It should read \bspirit\b.