Regular expression question

Does the regular expression parser have anything equivalent to Perl's \w
word boundary metacharacter?

I want to select tuples where a text field contains a certail whole word.
Using fieldname ~* 'searchword' wont work because it picks up the
searchword emdedded in other words. Using ~*' searchword ' wont find it at
the beginning or end of the string.
So far we have:
field ~*' searchword ' OR field ~*'^searchword ' OR field ~*' searchword$'
but I would like something more elegant.

Steve

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