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Suppose I have a set of criteria used in digital searches (such as "year is earlier than 1900", "name begins with S"). The user can choose whether to search for records matching ALL of their criteria, or ANY (at least one) of their criteria.

What noun describes the property that the user is choosing: the "AND-or-OR-ness" of the search? (Other logical operations could also be available in theory, like exclusive-OR.) I'm thinking there might be a technical term along the lines of "distributivity", though that's not the one.

Sample sentence: "The user's search didn't return any results because she picked the wrong ____: there are people beginning with S and birthdates before 1900, but not both."

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  • Search criteria, as in your first sentence. If the selection is only one search item, you technically have only one search criterion, not criteria, but you can't win them all.
    – Yosef Baskin
    Commented Feb 19, 2020 at 16:00
  • It's a logic gate or bitwise operator I guess ?
    – Smock
    Commented Feb 19, 2020 at 16:12
  • Seems as though it's the breadth of the search, although it doesn't fit your ___ well. Requiring all the search terms to be found is a narrow search, any of them is a broad search. "The user's search didn't return any results because it was too narrow."
    – Weather Vane
    Commented Feb 19, 2020 at 16:16
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    What's wrong with logical operation? || how about query? The user's search didn't return any results because she picked the wrong query . . . For that matter, how could her query be wrong? It's not wrong because it yielded 0 results; why on earth would anyone ever want the set of everyone born before 1900 and everyone whose name begins with S?
    – Tinfoil Hat
    Commented Feb 19, 2020 at 16:34
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    The terms and and or are grammatical conjunctions, and logical connectives.
    – jxh
    Commented Feb 20, 2020 at 10:50

2 Answers 2

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If your audience is technical, you can call one of them a logical operator.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Logical_Operators

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In English usage they are conjunctions that connect words or phrases.

What are examples of conjunctions? Conjunction is a word that joins words, phrases, clauses or sentence. e.g. but, and, yet, or, because, nor, although, since, unless, while, where etc. Examples: She bought a shirt and a book.

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  • Conjunctions are, however, not quite the same thing as logical operators, and the OP is interested in the latter. For example, and and but are different conjunctions, but the logical operator behind them is the same. Or, on the other hand, is notoriously ambiguous between two different logical operators.
    – jsw29
    Commented Jun 10, 2021 at 15:48

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