Boolean & Field Operators for USPTO Trademark Search (Formerly TESS)
The single biggest mistake in a trademark search is typing one exact spelling and trusting the result. Confusion does not require identical marks, so a good search has to reach spelling variants, sound-alikes, and related wording. That is what Boolean operators and field tags are for. They work in the USPTO Trademark Search system (the tool that replaced TESS in 2023) and turn a blunt keyword lookup into a precise, high-coverage query.
Boolean operators: AND, OR, NOT
Boolean logic combines search terms to widen or narrow your results:
- AND requires both terms — use it to narrow, e.g. a mark term and a class restriction.
- OR accepts either term — use it to broaden across spelling and word variants in a single query.
- NOT excludes a term — use it to strip out a large, irrelevant cluster of results.
Group terms with parentheses to control the order of evaluation, exactly as you would in math: an OR list inside parentheses, ANDed against a second condition, keeps the logic predictable.
Wildcards and truncation
A truncation symbol stands in for any characters, so one query can capture plurals, suffixes, and variant endings. Searching the root of a term with truncation is one of the most effective ways to surface derivatives you would never think to type individually — it catches compounds, tenses, and misspell-adjacent forms in a single pass.
Field tags: search a specific part of the record
By default a search runs broadly, but field tags restrict a term to one field, which sharpens precision dramatically:
- Owner name — pull a company's whole portfolio (see searching by owner).
- Goods and services — find marks used on the same products, where conflicts usually live.
- International class — limit to the relevant Nice class or its neighbors.
- Live/Dead and Register — filter to active marks, or to the Principal Register only.
Design search codes for logos
Word searches never find a wordless logo. The USPTO indexes design elements with six-digit design search codes from its Design Search Code Manual — a code for stars, another for a specific animal, and so on. Searching by design code is the only reliable way to find visually similar marks that share no text with yours.
Why precision changes the outcome
Every variant you fail to search is a conflict you cannot see. A registration you miss during clearance is exactly the kind of mark a USPTO examining attorney can cite to refuse your application under Section 2(d) for likelihood of confusion. Building queries that reach phonetic equivalents and related goods is how a search stops being a formality and starts being real risk assessment. If your searches keep coming back empty or noisy, our guide to common search errors covers the usual causes.