Exclude a word or criterion

How it works

Put a hyphen right before the term to exclude, with no space: dinner -movie searches for "dinner" while leaving out anything containing "movie".

Examples

• dinner -movieOpen in Gmail ↗

  Messages about dinner, without "movie".

What it does well

• The shortest way to cut the noise from a search that is too broad.

What it does badly

• Gmail matches individual messages first, then groups them into conversations: a conversation can therefore appear in the results even though it contains an excluded message, if another of its messages matches.Documented by Google · Gmail Help: search operators

See also

• OR{ }Keeps messages that match at least one of the criteria.
• ANDKeeps messages that match all of the criteria.
• " "Searches for words in that precise order, side by side.