Substring

noun, verb

noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A (possibly zero-length) string of characters that is contained in another string.

    "The substrings of "button" include "butt", "ton", and "on"."

  2. 2
    a string that is part of a longer string wordnet
Verb
  1. 1
    To extract a substring from. transitive

    "If an existing character-based column is increased in size and your program does not need the extra characters, the view can be changed to force the smaller size by substringing the existing column."

  2. 2
    To take as a substring. transitive

    "In this example, knowing that MY_SOUNDEX returns at most six characters, we are substringing the first six characters."

Example

More examples

"The substrings of "button" include "butt", "ton", and "on"."

Etymology

From sub- + string.

More for "substring"

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.