As a partial response to SMK's concerns about the search engine, I've defined the <gloss> tag as "inline" in the context of <entry>, <def>, <sense> and <seg>, in the index configuration file. This means that it does not constitute a word-break for the purpose of indexing, so that if you search for "dropped", you'll now find instances of <gloss>drop</gloss>ped. A natural by-product, though, is that you'll no longer find this item if you search for "drop". That's the trade-off. Without a working English stemming analyzer for eXist (and there doesn't seem to be one at the moment), there's no way to have your cake and eat it, unfortunately.